Verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings. They are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly… One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions…to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel, that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars–and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love…one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window… And yet still it is not yet enough to have memories themselves. Not til they have turned to blood within us, to glance and to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves–not til then can it happen that in the most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
And so we carry on. This gives us purpose, no matter how hard it may sometimes seem. 'Cause at the end of it, maybe we make something meaningful out of it all, and extend it out beyond ourselves and our own internal world, out to another.
