'we have become accustomed to lesser things'

Sometimes I reflect on how heaven came to be and death: through our having distanced what is most precious to us, because there was still so much to do beforehand and because it was not secure with us busy people. Now times have elapsed over this, and we have become accustomed to lesser things. We no longer recognize that which is our own and are terrified by its extreme greatness. May that not be?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)