Letters to a Young Poet, Fear of the Inexplicable--Rainer Maria Rilke But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively For if we think of this existence of Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now How should we be able to forget those Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless |