'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)

'infinite distances continue to exist'

A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Aug. 17, 1901, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 1, 1892–1910 (trans. Greene & Norton 1945)

'stand guard over the solitude of the other'

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Feb. 12, 1902, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 1, 1892–1910 (trans. Greene & Norton 1945)

Is it possible?

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and mean that this is something they have in common?—Just take a couple of schoolboys: one buys a pocket knife and his companion buys another exactly like it on the same day. And after a week they compare knives and it turns out that there is now only a very distant resemblance between the two—so differently have they developed in different hands. ("Well", says the mother of one, "if you must always wear everything out immediately—") Ah, so: Is it possible to believe one could have a God without using him?

Yes, it is possible.

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

'growing in the direction of your own nature'

Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.

He tried telling Kootenai Bob about this development. “Howling, are you?” the Indian said. “There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.”

—Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011) (originally published in The Paris Review, 2002)

We are Sun and Moon

I'm serious. We are not meant to come together, not any more than sun and moon were meant to come together, or sea and land. We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

—Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

'No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world ...'

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands a plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared—I carry them in my beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool" (trans. Saul Bellow 1953)

'No book written by someone is his grave.'

For some reason, I wanted expressly to discuss the great philosopher. Nodding my head at the book, I said, "I've been to his grave at Könisberg."

"I'm at his grave right now," said my companion, motioning to the open page.

A strange comparison. Doubtless there was nothing like that written there. Kant's thoughts are alive even now. No book written by someone is his grave, I wanted to believe.

—Arvo Valton, "On the Church Step" (1992), from Estonian Short Stories (trans. Ritva Poom 1996)

one little island in a very dark ocean

Soon, the priest spoke at length of his fears, while the hermit, mender of tents, listened patiently until the sun had begun to leak through the chinks in the west wall to paint glowing shafts in the dusty air.
      “Since the death of the last civilization, the Memorabilia has been our special province, Benjamin. And we’ve kept it. But now? I sense the predicament of the shoemaker who tries to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers.”
      The hermit smiled. “It could be done, if he manufactures a special and superior type of shoe.”
      “I’m afraid the secular scholars are already beginning to lay claim to such a method.”
      “Then go out of the shoemaking business, before you are ruined.”
      “A possibility,” the abbot admitted. “It’s unpleasant to think of it however. For twelve centuries, we’ve been one little island in a very dark ocean. Keeping the Memorabilia has been a thankless task, but a hallowed one, we think. It’s only our worldly job, but we’ve always been bookleggers and memorizers, and it’s hard to think that the job’s soon to be finished—soon to become unnecessary. I can’t believe that somehow.”

—Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Real Suffering

He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: "These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today."

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1929)