Saturday, December 13, 2008

Dragon Princesses

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. (...) But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual (...) But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatic, will live a relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. (...) We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment of our lives are princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once act beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

Rainer Maria Rilk (German poet) : "Letters to a Young Poet."

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When I come across writing (such as the passage above) that moves me, I love to mull over it a few days.

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