Beyond Beautiful Music – Rainer Maria Rilke: Quote of the Day

“It is not only the hearable in music that is important (something can be pleasant to hear without being true). What is decisive for me, in all the arts, is not their outward appearance, not what is called the “beautiful”; but rather their deepest, most inner origin, the buried reality that calls forth their appearance.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke¹

Taking his own advice, here’s his sonnet XVII, from Sonnets to Orpheus²:

Where inside what forever blissfully watered gardens, upon what trees,
out of what deep and tenderly unpetaled flower-cups,
do the exotic fruits of consolation hang ripening? Those
rare delicacies, of which you find one perhaps

in the trampled meadows of your poverty. Time and again
you have stood there marveling over the sheer size of the fruit,
over its wholeness, its smooth and unmottled skin,
and that the lightheaded bird or the jealous worm under the ground had not

snatched it away from your hands. Are there such trees, flown through
by angels and so strangely cared for by gardeners hidden and slow
that they bear their fruit to nourish us, without being ours?

Is it true we have never been able (we who are only
shadows and shades), through our ripening and wilting so early,
to disturb the enormous calm of those patient summers?

Now go lift something heavy,
Nick Horton

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1. From a letter to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. ↩
2. These translations are from Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell. ↩

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