The Path is Circular, Not Linear
A Riff off Rilke
A century after sending me a letter, a German poet forever changed the way I see the world.
Okay, he may have technically addressed the letter to another young poet, but to me it seemed as bespoke as it was universal:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I’ve since found this spoonful of Rilke an excellent prescription for any young person seeking advice.
It’s equally apt in midlife.
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Further along the age spectrum, his poem “Widening Circles” poses a bigger question:
Widening Circles
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?-Rainer Maria Rilke (Tr. Joanna Macy)
Parts of it hit me like a thunderbolt. Other parts not quite. Some not at all.
So, I chose to rewrite it for myself. Same question to live. Different way of seeing it.
I don’t know what Rilke would think of my homage, but I believe he would at least agree on this: the path is not linear but circular.
