Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images, it is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations–and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.

Rilke to Countess Margot

Once, by suddenly becoming a beast which might be cast into the fire with impunity, I used to penetrate secrets of the first order. By the flash of light which divided me, by the stroke of my claw, I knew lies and crimes before they were committed.

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

‘We see that in the world of Nature, the dimmer and weaker intellect grows, the more radiantly and imperiously grace emerges. But just as a section drawn through two lines, considered from one given point, after passing through infinity, suddenly arrives on the other side of that point; or as the image in a concave mirror, after vanishing into infinity, suddenly reappears right in front of us; so grace too returns when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form in which consciousness is either nonexistent or infinite, i.e., in the marionette or in the god.’

‘Does that mean,’ I said, a bit bewildered, ‘that we must eat again of the Tree of Knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence?’

‘Certainly,’ he answered. ‘That is the last chapter in the history of the world.’

from Heinrich von Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theater’

Sonnet 190

A doe of purest white upon green grass
wearing two horns of gold appeared to me
between two streams beneath a laurel’s shade
at sunrise in that season not yet ripe.

The sight of her was so sweetly austere
that I left all my work to follow her,
just like a miser who in search of treasure
with pleasure makes his effort bitterless.

‘No one touch me,’ around her lovely neck
was written out in diamonds and in topaz,
‘It pleased my Caesar to create me free.’

The sun by now had climbed the sky midway
my eyes were tired but not full from looking
when I fell into water, and she vanished.

Petrarch

 http://nessunmitochi.blogspot.com/

During the printing of the Elegies, Rilke explained this in a note on the proof sheets:

As if it were the label on a druggist’s urn; abbreviation of Subrisio Saltat(orum). The labels on these receptacles almost always appear in abbreviated form.

For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent because they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are already invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting….All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality; a few stars intensify immediately and pass away into the infinite consciousness of the angels-, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We, let it be emphasized once more, we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task (beside which there is, essentially, no other.)
Rilke to Witold Hulewicz, November 1925

He says everybody at Bellvue is somebody who lost love somewhere along the line. The ones that love means the most to get sick, a lot of them die. It doesn’t take very long, either. (Saroyan, p. 152)

? i am sleeping on it. i have been writing my way through my dreams in real time – not afterward but during.

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.

(Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, February 1914)

My name isn’t really Clara, but Thea. That’s not in my passport. My religious upbringing, as I’ve told you, has been strictly orthodox and I’m sure I correspond to what my mother and father think a good daughter ought to be.

I have suffered a great many bodily ills, the worst an irritation which has persecuted me like a waking nightmare for two years. Another torment is my over-developed sensitivity. I react violently to sudden noises, intense light (I’m blind in one eye) or unpleasant smells. The normal pressure of a dress, for instance, can drive me mad with pain. When I was fifteen, I married a young Austrian actor. I wanted to start in the theater, but the marriage was unhappy, I had a child who died, and I went back to the school in Switzerland. Now the dry twilight rattles above the child’s head. I can’t go on. I cry now.

My glass eye also weeps.

I pretend I am a saint or a martyr. I can sit for hours at the big table in the closed room (where we played the forbidden records.) I can sit for hours gazing at the palms of my hands. Once a redness appeared out of my left palm, but no blood. I pretend I am sacrificing myself for my brothers. I am saving them from mortal danger. I pretend ecstasy and speak to the Holy Virgin. I pretend faith and disbelief, defiance and doubt. I pretend I am a rejected sinner with an insupportable burden of guilt. Suddenly I reject the guilt and forgive myself. It’s all a game. I am pretending.

Within the game, I am the same, sometimes extremely tragic, sometimes boundlessly exhilarated. All with the same small effort. I confided in a doctor (I’ve been to so many doctors.) He told me that my dreaming and idle life were damaging my psyche. He prescribed specific things that would force me to leave the prison of my egocentricity. Order. Self-discipline. Tasks. Corsets. My father, who is so gentle, so wise and coolly calculating, says that I should not worry, that everything exists in all things, and living is a torment that one overcomes with resignation, but preferably without cynicism. I am not keen on that kind of effort, so I’m thinking of going even further into my games, taking them more seriously, if you understand what I mean.

(from The Magic Lantern)