At the mailbox the road was quiet. Inside the box, a few letters, no book.
Making our way back up the hill, we stopped by the pear tree to admire the elegant Flemish Beauty and take a picture. During the past week I've been re-reading the poetry of Rilke, and on Saturday I ordered his Letters on Life, selections from over a thousand of those letters to friends, family and other poets. The pear made me think of a passage that struck me yesterday:
"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."
But to have been
once, even though only once:
this having been earthly seems
lasting, beyond repeal.
All that we
can achieve here, is to recognize
ourselves completely
in what can be seen on earth
RANIER MARIA RILKE
DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)