From Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Tags
academia
apologies
being a christian
being a grownup
bible
clementine
feeling right again
feminism
gender debates
good friends
grad school
great big honking life choices
guilty pleasures
hebrew
ineptitude
Israel
knitting
language
life
macbeth
meta
milton
nanowrimo
nostalgia
notre dame
perilous statistics
poetry
poetry out loud
priorities
quote
recipes
religion
rilke
ritual
sad news
self-limiting thought patterns
spiraling into insanity
stories
stress
teaching
time
unexpected friends
whining
why the hell can't I figure out a VCR
writing
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
December 27, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Dan
I was searching the internet to locate the precise quote from Rilke that you used to name your site. Found it here of course and then also “The Grownup”. My lovely daughter, mother of three, turns 38 in January. Her post Christmas email was full of joy and yet shared the burden of life questions which she is working too hard to answer. For her birthday I am composing a medley of poems and photos to cheer her questioning on… the Rilke poems I noted above, Neruda’s “The Book of Questions”, Rumi’s “This being is human is a guest house…” and another Rumi that hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet (about inconsciously knocking on the door for answers – only to discover he is already inside).
Anyway, all of this just to explain why I am saying THANK YOU for being a source of some of the wisdom I seek. May you continue to be blessed in your good intentions and the courage to exercise them in the world. I wish you had been my English teacher oh so many years ago. Peace.
January 22, 2008 at 3:30 am
lovethequestions
Wow…what a wonderful thing to say. Thank you so much!
March 7, 2008 at 5:07 am
bibomedia.com
September 24, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Liz
Hey there! I got over to your blog from Mary Frances’s homepage. I will now keep tabs on you wayy more often. Haha, I know you’re glad. Hope everything’s going well! – Liz
March 11, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Cornelia Seigneur
I love Rilke!!
cornelia