Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters

Read and discuss the fourth letter, on page 13, here
Rainer Maria Rilke Letters
Optionally read the letters on pages 19,23,28, and 33.

How do you relate to yourself? And an other? I’ll try to answer…

Pause, and think, and sense, and get beyond your memory and constructed world, the incidental details of your remembered life one minute ago, one hour ago, and the story that you tell yourself about your day, and your life, and what you think that you are, and focus on the present. Can you do this? Are you comfortable, moving within the narrow bounds of your thoughts? Can you stop the spinning from one vague notion to another and focus on the simple present? Can you be alone, and drop the exigencies of both the fabrications of your intellect and the vague animal sense of your emotional current? Pause, and think.

Being alone. Here’s poem by Padraig O Tuama
a video poem

Then there is the other. You know when you really connect with another, which almost never happens, as we mostly and casually relate to the other as an it, not a you, not a thou. When it does happen, there is an oceanic feeling, and the words are not fabricated, but are simply an expression of your being. It’s a simple thing, but rare, like the glint of the sun on a spider’s web; but not a pattern, a flowing thing. And the words aren’t actually spoken, but shared. Finding yourself, touching an other, is the distillation of being.

Simple questions; hard to answer.

Now you try to answer…