Rainer Maria Rilke

I have just finished one of the best classes I've ever taken: The Dilemma of Existence. We touched on so many topics regarding death and living a happy and truthful life. Anyway, our final reading was Rilke's The Duino Elegies, a must read for everybody! I do not want to discuss the ending, because the process of getting to the final conclusion is as important as the end itself. All I will say is that it gives an incredible perspective on life and how we should be enjoying every moment of it; we are lucky not to be perfect and flawless, our imperfections prompt awe and wonder.


My next read is Letters to a Young Poet (in hopes that it will fuel my research project as a supplementary resource). Before we left our last class, my teacher gave us the following excerpt from the book and I find it to be a great inspiration:

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to I beg you, as much as I can, to 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. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant into an answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

I think I live a life full of questions and this quote will continue to urge me to keep asking and seeking questions. Humans are lucky to have curiosity about the world and about life.  We will be asking questions forever, for there can never be an end to what we desire to know; this is the beauty of being imperfect creatures (read The Duino Elegies)