Excerpt from "Letters to a Young Poet"

Rainer Maria Rilke

"You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise...If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches. and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear out sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.

For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,-is already in our bloodstream...We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes."