Transitoriness is everywhere plunging into a profound Being. And therefore all the forms of the here and now are not merely to be used in a time limited way, but so far as we can, instated within those superior significances in which we share. Not, though, in the Christian sense (from which I more and more passionately withdraw), but, in a purely terrestrial, deeply terrestrial, blissfully terrestrial consciousness, to instate what is here seen and touched within the wider, within the widest orbit—that is what is required. Not within a Beyond, whose shadow darkens the earth, but within a whole, within the whole . . . For our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly”, in us. We are the bees of the Invisible.
SOURCE: Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies [German, 1923; English, 1939], the German text, with an English translation, introduction, and commentary by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1963), from a letter of November 13, 1925 to Rilke’s Polish translator Witold von Hulewicz [Halewicz] on the meaning of the Elegies, p.128. Also: London: Hogarth, 1963, p. 157.
Robert Zend (Hungarian-Canadian writer, 1929-1985):
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by Rainer Maria Rilke,
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