#the duino elegies

“Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing.”

Because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one's heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is inexpressible.

Yes--the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)

Look, I live. But on what? Neither childhood nor future, for neither diminishes... Superabundant being wells up in my heart.

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for---that longed after, mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart so painfully meets.

..our heart survives between hammers, just as the tongue between teeth is still able to praise.