When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.
Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses, as its inner truth, the inexhaustable wealth of what is on every day as if that day were its first.
To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.
Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves.
If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.
