Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes (Author of Letters to a Young Poet) (page 37 of 52) | Goodreads
“Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited...
It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly, existence, which are not dependent on time and space.
From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition (and have also, as far as I could, lived by it) that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
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"외부" 세계가 광대하기 때문에 모든 항성 거리와 함께 우리 내면의 차원, 깊이 차원과 거의 비교할 수 없으며 우주의 넓음 자체가 거의 무제한일 필요조차 없는 ...
마치 우리의 평범한 의식이 피라미드의 정점에 살고 있는 것처럼 보입니다. 피라미드의 정점은 우리 안에 있는(말하자면 우리 아래) 우리가 더 멀리 보낼 수 있을 정도로 확장됩니다. 그 속으로 들어갈수록 우리는 시간과 공간에 구애받지 않는 세속적 실재와 가장 넓은 의미에서 세속적 실재에 더 완전하게 포함되어 있는 것처럼 보입니다.
어린 시절부터 나는 이 의식 피라미드의 더 깊은 단면에서 단순한 존재가 하나의 사건이 될 수 있다는 직관을 느꼈습니다. 자의식의 정점인 "정상적인" 상부에 있는 우리가 경험하는 모든 것은 엔트로피로서만 경험하도록 허용됩니다."
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O hours of childhood,
when, behind the images, there was more
than the past, and in front of us was not the future.
We were growing, it’s true, and sometimes urged that
we soon grew up, half for the sake
of those others who had nothing but their grown-up-ness.
And were, yet, on our own, happy
with Timelessness, and stood there,
in the space between world and plaything,
at a point that from first beginnings
had been marked out for pure event.
The world of the child in contrast to that of adults has moments in eternity where the past and future are absent from consciousness in the intensity of gaze, or play. The child exists in the space between world and plaything. Rilke, in his essay on Dolls of 1914, asks us to remember one of those toys, those things of childhood, which first focused attention on the other, even though an inanimate other, some ‘forgotten object that was ready to signify everything. He suggests the child experiences ‘through its existence, its humdrum appearance, its final breakage, and enigmatic exit, all that is human, right into the depths of death.’
What the child experiences, and the adult finds so hard to recover, is unconditional being, in moments of intensity which for the child are casual and everyday, those instances of conscious awareness that Rilke calls pure event. In a letter of 1903 he praised the hours of loneliness ‘vast inner loneliness’ from which the child regards the alien adult world it fails to comprehend, because those hours enshrine a precious and ‘wise lack of understanding’ that remains connected to pure event. And elsewhere, in a letter of 1924, he describes the intuition ‘that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we on the normal higher level of consciousness are permitted to experience only as entropy.’ Rilke now questions whether we see or portray childhood that is, portray ourselves, fully if we ignore the facts of our mortal fate, our ultimate death.
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/TheFountainOfJoy.php
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Being and Death: the existential quests of Rilke's Duino Elegies
2021
Author(s): Ren, Jiyuan
Advisor(s): Ross, Cheri
Being and death are two philosophical themes in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The poet discerns that the anonymous death of mass is prevailing in modern society, due to modern man’s lack of awareness of their own existence in the world. This inauthenticity, partly as an outcome of materialism which arbitrarily sets a dual relation between man and things, is criticized by the poet, along with an inner quest of one’s authentic being, a non-subjective self.
The means Rilke pursues to touch the inner existence as an antithesis of phenomenal object, to purify the representation, hence, to have man recover from loss and absence through restoring a harmonious man-world relation, is the transformation of consciousness. Based upon Heidegger’s hermeneutic works on poetics, this paper tries to interrogate the philosophical themes of being and death in Duino Elegies through closing reading.
The letters of the poet, and his early work would be examined with a focus on their existential themes, in order to clarify that special point of Rilke’s thanatology made by Duino Elegies, the impersonality of death, which is symbolized as the Angel’s indifferent beauty. Several models of consciousness would be addressed for a better understanding of Rilke’s concepts of transformation and the invisible. One is of German poet Heinrich von Kleist, wherein the hierarchical structure consciousness is presented with the tree image, while the other is borrowed from Rilke’s metaphor, that consciousness is like a pyramid, its vast base turns to be the consciousness of the totality of being.
This paper tries to answer the following questions: How could man through transformation transcend the limitations of self-consciousness? How, death, in its disillusioned impersonality, is demanded by the Duino Elegies for man’s full presence of existence as his ownmost potentiality of Being? The final question, along with a review of the whole elegies, is on the relation between art and humanity: through its mystic flow of images, how does poetic language present such ineffable transformation, insofar as there is a hope in art to redeem man from a universal loss in the modern age? In regard of Rilke’s Open (das Offene) and world-inner-space (Weltinnenraum), the metonymy of the animals, plants, and the Angel would be analyzed to know how they are connected to the same continuum of consciousness, and how transcendence takes place in the very extremity of such metaphysical field.
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Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926, Czech-Austrian Poet
Being / Essence / Soul
Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions , of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly , existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.
Wisdom for The Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing , © 2004
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