Long Night of Struggle (my post at TCW)

“It is clear we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court...

Quotes about the New Year

  I’m living just as the century ends. A great leaf, that God and you and I have covered with writing turns now, overhead, in strange hands. We feel the sweep of it like a wind. We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen. — Rainer...

Poems by Rilke

  Piano Practice by Rainer Maria Rilke The summer hums. The afternoon fatigues; she breathed her crisp white dress distractedly and put into it that sharply etched etude her impatience for a reality that could come: tomorrow, this evening–, that perhaps was...

Sunset (by Rilke)

  Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth. ~Rainer Maria Rilke: Sunset      ...

Autumn by Rainer Maria Rilke

AUTUMN The leaves are falling, falling as from far, as though above were withering farthest gardens; they fall with a denying attitude. And night by night, down into solitude, the heavy earth falls far from every star. We are all falling. This hand’s falling too...