The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

Empathy is humility, imitation is vanity—and thus it ought to be possible soon to notice whether one intends one or the other.

Perhaps the poet is intended to act truly outside of fate and becomes ambiguous, imprecise, untenable wherever he engages in it. Just as the hero becomes true only inside of his fate, the poet grows mendacious in it; the former maintains himself in tradition, the latter in indiscretion.

To be close to another person who holds opposing views while being a deep, committed friend can be a wonderful, shaping influence. For as long as one remains forced to consider (as one is primarily in one’s relation to one’s parents and other older people) anything other as something false, bad, hostile instead of plainly other, one will not enter into an unforced and just relation with the world where all things are meant to have a place: part and counterpart; I and the one who is most different from me. And only when such a complete world is admitted to and considered possible will one succeed in arranging one’s own interiority with its internal contrasts and contradictions generously, spaciously, and with sufficient air to breathe.

There is a single, deadly mistake that we can make: to attach ourselves to another human being even if only for an instant.

From one human being to another everything is so difficult and so unrehearsed and so without a model and example that one would have to live within every relationship with complete attentiveness and be creative in every moment that requires something new and poses tasks and questions and demands . . .

It seems to me to result in nothing but disorder when a collective presumes that its efforts (an illusion, incidentally!) may relieve or abolish difficulties schematically. This might impair a person’s freedom much more than suffering itself, which imparts to the individual who confides in it indescribably fitting and almost tender instructions on how to escape it—if not to the outside, then to the inside. The wish to improve another person’s situation presupposes a level of insight into his conditions that even a poet does not possess with regard to a character he himself invented. A person trying to help is even less equipped to do so; his distractedness reaches completion with his gift. The wish to alter and improve another person’s situation means to offer him in lieu of the difficulties in which he has practice and experience other difficulties that might find him even more baffled.

Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone.

This is not as bad as it may appear at first glance; it is also the best thing about life that everyone contains everything within himself: his fate, his future, his entire scope and world. Now there surely exist moments when it is difficult to be within oneself and to endure within one’s own I. It happens that precisely when one ought to hold on to oneself more tightly and—one would almost have to say—more obstinately than ever, one attaches oneself to something external, and that during important events one shifts one’s proper center out of oneself into something alien, into another human being. This is against the most basic principles of equilibrium and can lead to nothing but great difficulty.

The privilege to cause joy is given to us far less frequently than one would think, partly owing to our often rigid incapacity to receive and partly owing to the imprecision and vagueness between people (this may always have been an obstacle), which has increased even more in confusing times. After all, even the most appropriate gift still requires the receiver to accommodate himself to an extreme degree. In cases of “well-matched” giving, in contrast, even this effort belongs to the natural movement of the person who receives the gift.

Departures create a burden within our emotions. The distance stays behind them with greater emphasis and works and grows and gains hold of all the commonalities that ought to remain instinctive even for those who are very far apart . . .

How telling that some people have defined the human to be the common element and the site where everybody can find and recognize each other. One has to learn to realize that it is precisely the human that makes us lonely.

The more human we become, the more different we become. It is as if suddenly human beings would multiply a thousandfold. A collective name that used to be sufficient for thousands will soon be too narrow for ten human beings, and we will be forced to consider each individual entirely on his own. Just think: when at some point we will have human beings instead of populations, nations, families, and societies; when it will no longer be possible to group even three people under one name! Will the world not have to grow larger then?

We have all known for a long time that only purely honest and joyous attempts are possible from one individual to another, and that even the most wonderful success does not obey any internal rhythm, and that it does not even have any measure at all. And don’t we also know that the capacities of a life can be tested only within that life, so that every being-cast-back-on-oneself has to be a natural occurrence, something necessary? To become superfluous somewhere means to need only yourself: if you are asked to achieve an ending somehow, this also means that you are receiving an order to begin anew; a new beginning is always possible—who should refuse it?

ON WORK

Get Up Cheerfully on Days You Have to Work

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

Ah, this longing to be able to begin, and always all of these blocked paths. How will it be with my work? Every morning I get up for this useless and anxious waiting, and go to sleep disappointed, disoriented, and overcome with my inability. Ah, if I had a manual craft, a daily task, something closer . . . instead of this waiting for faraway things. Is it arrogance? Alas, for whom the will wavers, for him wavers the world.

This is the one experience that has been confirmed repeatedly and to which I have progressed slowly after a fearful, despondent childhood: that the true advances of my life could not be brought about by force but occur silently, and that I prepare for them while working quietly and with concentration on the things that on a deep level I recognize to be my tasks.

We have to mix our work with ourselves at such a deep level that workdays turn into holidays all by themselves, into our actual holidays.

Before they had a genuine opportunity to truly get to know work, people had already invented leisure as a diversion from and the opposite of false work. If they had waited, alas, and if they had been patient for a good while, then true work would have been slightly more within their reach and they would have realized that work cannot have an opposite just as the world cannot have one, or god, or any living soul.