Quotes From Rainer Maria Rilke (2)

Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke

Quoted in Lou Salome’s You Alone Are Real to Me:

I stand as if blind and in total darkness
because my look no longer finds its way to you.
The mad rush of days is
only a curtain, behind which you exist.
I stare up to see if it is not lifted,
the curtain behind which my life lives.
My life’s strength, my life’s necessity
and yet: my death.


Neither am I the two dark seas,
Nor the sinuous strait.
Neither can I drown in the current
Nor run aground on the high jagged cliffs.

I thought once that I was a navigator.
But the sextant moves eerily upright as if guided
By the hand of some phantom or ghost.

—Me, July 2016

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