Lightly Touched?

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty's nothing but the beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible. And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there we can make use of? Not angels, not men; and already the knowing brutes are aware that we don't feel very securely at home within our interpreted world. There remains, perhaps, some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day, there remains for us yesterday's walk and the cupboard-love loyalty of a habit that liked us and stayed and never gave notice. Oh, and there's Night, there's Night, when wind full of cosmic space feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, longed for, mild enchantress, painfully there for the lonely heart to achieve? Is she lighter for lovers? Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot! Don't you know yet? — Fling the emptiness of your arms into the spaces we breathe — maybe that the birds will feel the extended air in more intimate flight.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, from "The First Elegy," Leischman/Spender (trs.), pp. 21-23.

     In reply to his 'young poet,' who had complained of his loneliness, Rilke wrote, in 1903, that loneliness was not to be regarded as an unfortunate accident, but as a real and necessary task:
     What's needed is just this: Loneliness, vast inner loneliness. To walk in oneself and to meet no one for hours on end, — that's what one must be able to attain. To be lonely in the way one was lonely as a child, when the grownups moved about involved in things that appeared important and big because the big ones looked so busy and because one understood nothing of what they were doing.
     And if, one day, one comes to perceive that their occupations are miserable, their professions moribund and no longer related to life, why not go on regarding them, like a child, as something alien, looking out from the depths of one's own world, from the expanse of one's own loneliness, which is itself work and rank and profession? Why want to exchange a child's wise not-understanding for defensiveness and contempt, when not-understanding means being alone, while defensiveness and contempt mean participation in that from which one is trying, by their means, to separate oneself? (Briefe an einer Dichter, 31-32.)
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., from Commentary on "Fourth Elegy," pp. 99-100.

....Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law. And those who live the secret wrong and badly (and they are very many), lose it only for themselves and still hand it on, like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And do not be confused by the multiplicity of names and the complexity of cases. Perhaps over all these is a great motherhood, as common as longing....
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters on Love," in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, John J. L. Mood (ed. and tr.), p. 35.

     To speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: ....
     So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
     ....For it is not enertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence....
     ....And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the  beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter Mood calls "The Dragon Princess," in Ibid., pp. 97-99.