Rilke and the song of life

Almost 150 years since his birth, Rainer Maria Rilke remains one of the greatest poets and devotees of Beauty and of life that history has known.

He defined true Love as “two solitudes that protect each other”.

To write even a single line of verse, he cautioned: “… one must feel how the birds fly, and know the movements with which small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to journeys through unknown lands, to unexpected encounters, and it is not enough to have memories. One must know how to forget them, when they are many, and have the patience to wait for them to return. But besides memories, we need experiences that become in us blood, gaze and gesture… only then are we ready for a line of verse”.

Someone who knows how to capture beauty and express it, in practice, is someone able to contemplate and live life at the same time: a being lost in action and yet capable of observing it.

As for life, he reflected that “death is the silent accomplice of everything alive”, that is, that to be truly alive we must be on intimate terms with death.

This small contribution is to remember his greatness, to celebrate one of the marvellous expressions of our history and of our time.

m.m.