The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

. . Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.

Fame today, in an age when everything is operated mechanically, is far from producing periods of quiet. Instead, once set in motion it creates the ruckus of an immense printing plant where it is impossible to hear one’s own words over thousands of fame-wheels and fame-belts, and everyone who approaches the individual who is caught in them finds himself ultimately also pressed into service and soon contributes to the machine’s monstrous actions and berserk roaring. Fame has to occur quickly in an era when its results are worn thin so rapidly; even the youngest people live among these fame-motors set up around them by a publisher and a few friends. It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!

You know that what appears inexorable must be present [in poetry] for the sake of our greatest desires. Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.

No one can lift so much beauty out of himself that it would conceal him entirely. A part of his being always remains visible behind it. But in times of greatest artistic achievement individuals have accumulated such a great and noble inheritance in addition to their beauty that the work no longer has any need for them. Curiosity and the habits of the audience search for and detect a personality; but there is no need for that. In such times, there exists art but no artists.

ON DIFFICULTY AND ADVERSITY

The Measure by Which We May Know Our Strength

A failure ought not to be a disappointment for those who take on the most extreme challenges and do not settle comfortably in what is modestly proportioned; it is the calibrated measure of our endeavors that is not even meant to be referred to our feelings or to be used as evidence against our achievement, which after all incessantly reconstitutes itself from a thousand new beginnings.

Apparently the power to establish order, which ranks among the most inexorable strengths of artistic creation, is summoned most insistently by two interior states: by one’s awareness of abundance and by the utter collapse within a human being, which, after all, yields yet another abundance.

To feel completely apathetic, when it includes even one’s emotions, is nature’s way of retreating and escaping; it is a violent measure taken by nature in order to be left alone.

The experience of something that has been thwarted is surely matched on the other side by something that has been unexpectedly fulfilled.

But of course one never knows with an individual whether he might not suddenly, even in spite of himself, discover the point from which he can gather himself into a new and coherent unity. This “task” is actually always there: it’s only that we, distracted by names, sometimes don’t recognize it in its namelessness.

I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even the most wonderful things when they become part of one’s daily interactions and surroundings.

This is not to say that one ought to weaken the impact of what is difficult or to take it less to heart so that it can be properly assimilated. On the contrary, the more fully we experience what is difficult, the more it pulls and drives us with its weight toward the center of life. And life’s gravitational field is oriented so centripetally that only if someone makes himself light by artificial means could he become estranged from it. No matter how horrified we may be by our detachment from what is reliable or familiar or beloved—which is called error, joy, or separation—we ultimately experience (if we only practice the most patient forbearance) such a complete, unshakable, even sublime being-part-of-the-whole that each instance when we miss it or depart from it seems only like a slight sensory illusion. And many of those instances taken together constitute the kind of preliminary reality that we are able to replace only gradually with the actual realities of our larger relations.

All of misery is always present and all of suffering, including the most extreme. There is surely, we tell ourselves, all of misery and all of suffering in full use at any given moment among humans, as much as there is all taken together. It is a fixed constant just as there is a fixed constant of happiness; only the distributions vary.

In life one cannot awaken often enough the sense of a beginning within oneself. There is so little external change needed for that since we actually transform the world from within our hearts. If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite.

This “taking life the hard way” with which my books are filled— this is not at all melancholy (and this “terrible” and that “consoling” that you have so affectionately embraced will move ever closer together in these books until it finally becomes One in them, their only essential content)—this not-taking-things-lightly is intended to be nothing else, right?, but a taking stock according to the true weight: that is, a true taking in of reality, an effort to weigh things in carats of the heart and not according to suspicion, luck, or chance. No refusal, right?!, no refusal; ah, on the contrary, how much endless affirmation and always more affirmation of existence!

Somewhere in space there must be sites where even that which is monstrous appears to be something natural, one of the rhythmic upheavals of the universe that is secured in its existence even at the point where we are doomed.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.

The most divine consolation is without a doubt contained within the human itself. We would not know very well what to do with the consolations of a god. All that is necessary is for our eye to be a trace more seeing, for our ear to be more receptive, for the flavor of a fruit to enter us more completely, for us to be able to tolerate more scent, and, in touching and being touched, to be more present-minded and less oblivious—in order to receive from our most immediate experiences consolations that would be more convincing, more significant and truer than any suffering that can ever unsettle us.

It is dispiriting to think what kind of things people turn to in their helpless, disoriented curiosity about themselves. Especially since everything about us originates in this state of not-knowing-ourselves.

Are there circumstances of the heart that include the greatest horrors for the sake of being complete, because the world is not world until Everything occurs within it?

How every creature is basically confronted with only that heaviness that exists on a level with its proper strengths, even if it then often vastly exceeds them.

We, however, being placed at the incomprehensible intersection of so many different and mutually contradictory surroundings, we are suddenly assaulted by a difficulty that has no connection whatsoever with our knowledge or its uses: by an alien difficulty.

(When would a swan be forced to undergo one of the lion’s ordeals? How could a piece of fish-fate enter the bat’s being, or the fright of a horse a digesting snake?)

The suffering that has defined the existence of mankind from the beginning of time cannot actually be intensified by any means. But it is certainly possible to intensify our insight into mankind’s unspeakable suffering, and this might yet lead to: so much decline— as if new beginnings were in the process of creating the distance and space they need to occur.

The most wonderful aspect of life still seems to me that some coarse and crude intervention and even a blatant violation can become the occasion for establishing a new order within us. This is indeed the most superb achievement of our vitality: that it interprets evil as something good and quite actually inverts the two. Without this kind of magic we would all be evil since evil touches and invades everyone. Anyone could be caught in a specific moment of being “bad”; only that one not stay put, that is the secret, that one continues to live.