...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
live the questions themselves ... like books written in a very foreign tongue...
ReplyDeleteI never heard that portion of this quote from Rilke. Wonderful! I think of the books, calligraphy and greeting cards I have in Japanese. While unable to read Japanese, with the help of a Japanese-English dictionary, I can laboriously translate sentences. The process is peculiar -- you first have to estimate the number of brushstrokes in a character because that is the way they are sorted out in a Japanese dictionary. Make sure you have a magnifying glass handy, too.
It occurs to me that is how we live the questions, one estimated brushstroke at a time in a tedious search for understanding.
Wow, Barbara, cool analogy.
ReplyDeleteImagine the day (age) when we can sight read :)