March: Rilke on Indifference

Rilke on:

"Indifference"

There's evidence of life in hatefulness, which is why indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Between lovers, what's worse than a shrug? Or you look in the mirror, and not even an old friend stares back, or anybody you'd be inclined to improve.
Otherwise, indifference may be what you can't help feeling toward someone who can't help inspiring it. It can be as natural as a yawn, not necessarily a failing or a falling away. Justified or not, indifference is never anything to be proud of; there's not a situation it has ever made better. For those regulars of indifference, to whom so little matters, some synapse between brain and society has snapped, some link between hearts and other hearts. They are beyond hurt, these masters of distance, they don't permit themselves the sweetness of the tragic world.

Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad. The only sadnesses that are unhealthy and dangerous are those we carry around in public in order to drown them out. Like illnesses that are treated superficially, they only recede for a while and then break out more severely. Untreated they gather strength inside us and become the rejected, lost, and unloved life that we may die of. If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown. Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

Borbeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

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So many feelings fit between two heartbeats

so many objects can be held in our two hands

Don't be surprised we can't describe the world

and just address things tenderly by name.

-Zbigniew Herbert, from "Never of You"

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