The Poet's Guide to Life Read Online

Nothing is more unsustainable than what is bad. This is why no one ought to think that he might “be” bad; he need only shift ever so slightly and he is no longer “bad.”

What a horrible state those are in who long to have an experience. Why do they do it? Because they could not cope with some early and then the third and fourth experience, and failed to assimilate it by truly dissolving it—that is why they continue to chase after the kind of experience for which they are no match. And it is by the grace of god alone if they remain only always in pursuit and if each new catch eludes them.

And yet, is this not what life is? This is what I think: that the countless paltry, timid, petty, and shameful details ultimately still amount to a wonderful whole—a whole that would not exist if it depended upon us to understand and achieve it, but to which we contribute in equal parts with our abilities and failures.

“Who would renounce jubilation?” I once wrote in a forgotten poem. Indeed: rejoicing cannot be renounced. Once a heart has been turned on to experiencing life’s innermost intensity—not only life in the so-called here and now but probably all being in its entirety—such a heart must consider itself completely fulfilled and privileged, even if the one who would be entitled to receive proof of this intensity turns away. (He himself loses something infinite by being kept for some reason from eliciting such proof over and over again.) To say it in the language of today: maybe such a heart can be called “unhappy,” and yet it will spontaneously have effects on everything of which it is a part. These effects will correspond to its actual and higher condition from which it cannot lapse again.

And while I considered all of the disturbances that the calamitous [war] years had caused others and myself, I also arrived at what seems like a valid response to the question regarding the famous “difficulties” that people are so often inclined to present as educational and productive. I think there ought to be one great, tremendous prayer that wishes for everyone to encounter on his path only that which is difficult for him, by which I mean that which is at least somehow proportionate with those tasks in his life that he has understood and passionately affirmed: this may then be great, even extraordinarily overpowering; it could even be fatal. For is there anyone, once he has accepted to fight a genuine struggle, who does not also feel a quiet sacred joy in perishing in it . . . but in it, not outside of it, not on terrain where his best, most serious, and most practiced skills, his strengths, his judgment, his accumulated experience seem paralyzed or never attain any relevance. Is this not the proper way of answering the question? Especially as far as the artist is concerned whose tasks absolutely and unreachably exceed him precisely on that terrain where he is most authentic. One would wish and indeed grant him above all others to be confronted (if possible, beginning in his youth) with nothing but his difficulties!

The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them also at a later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful, and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete.

Whatever is heavy and difficult, as long as it is only borne properly, also marks the precise weight of life. It teaches us the measure by which we may know our strength and which we may then also apply when we feel blessed with happiness.

It is confusing to no end that so much difficulty and pain originate in the ultimately superfluous and unnecessary distortions and paralyses of existence, which for times immemorial have resulted from the nonwakefulness, sluggishness, and narrowness of human circumstances and which have been heaped in great quantities on that which is actually life’s happiness. We live underneath the debris of institutions that fell into ruin long ago, and whenever we find a way out there may be the pure sky above but still no order around us, and then we stand even more isolated and threatened by the daily danger of sudden new collapses. Sometimes I cannot look at several people together, not even complete strangers toward whom I am entirely indifferent, without realizing with the deepest internal fright how very much they act in falsehood. When they begin to talk simply to escape the embarrassment caused by their mutual strangeness and silence (which is considered impolite), and when they really find words for hours, whole bundles of words that sound as if they had been bought cheaply at auction, how time passes then: And yet this evening is an irreplaceable hour of their lives. And yet they are surrounded everywhere by sublime nature, which ought to summon anyone who innocently raises his eyes to great thoughts and vast feelings. And yet each one of them faces a night that will scare him with its unmastered depths and urgently impose on him the disasters from which he averts his eyes, the failures for which he does not make up, his unacknowledged grief. A night during which he is even more than usually the property and play-thing of his death, this death that he despises and denies before his own blood that courses in sweet and intimate agreement with it.

Among lonely people there is not a single one who can be sure that in his suffering he might not yet console someone else and that the gestures of his most personal helplessness, like so many cues and signals, might not serve as signs guiding the way in the realm of the unfathomable.

ON CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION

This Joy in Daily Discovery

Childhood—what actually was it? What was it, this childhood? Is there any other way of asking about it except with this helpless question—what was it?: that burning, that being amazed, that incessant not-being-able-to-help-oneself, that sweet, that profound, that beaming feeling-of-tears-welling-up? What was it?

Most people do not know at all how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. Adults, being preoccupied with business and worries and tormenting themselves with all kinds of petty details, gradually lose the very sight for these riches that children, when they are attentive and good, soon notice and love with all their heart. And yet the greatest beauty would be achieved if everyone remained in this regard always like attentive and good children, naïve and pious in feeling, and if people did not lose the capacity for taking pleasure as intensely in a birch leaf or a peacock’s feather or the wing of a hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a magnificent palace. What is small is not small in itself, just as that which is great is not—great. A great and eternal beauty passes through the whole world, and it is distributed justly over that which is small and that which is large; for in important and essential matters, there exists no injustice anywhere on earth.

Art is childhood.

There is really no more beautiful way of putting one’s own life force to the test than by recognizing and seizing joy itself, without exaggeration but purely with the strength of joy, and to grasp with its proper measure the perfection and loveliness of a few days without even the least sense of a “too much.” A child, after all, does nothing but that, and we are always closest to the center of our lives at the point where according to our own means we most closely resemble the child!

Why, by god, does one spend one’s life according to conventions that constrict us like a tight costume and that prevent us from reaching the invisible soul, this dancer among the stars!

We do not claim life by means of an “education” but only in those spots where there is devotion, reverence, a joyous resolve and an expansive heart. This is the question: does your heart yearn for one thing alone? And is this thing the theater in its greatest and most noble sense? And are you committed to this heart, which has thus risen for this one thing, for all of life and to the death? Or do you give yourself also to other things, and desires, and intentions? Here, now, examine yourself.

I maintain that we have made things much easier for our children and even spared them many things, frequently without any active attempt on our part, because certain facts that have become known through psychological discoveries, whether we are aware of them or not, have assumed an immediate reality within us. And we are much more likely to base our actions on this reality than on the principles and moralities that may still cling to us and that we think we have to maintain because of our “professional” obligation as parents, so to speak . . .

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

Childhood is a land entirely independent of everything.