from Rainer Maria Rilke's notebooks:
I think I ought to begin to do some works now that I am learning to see. I am 28 years old, and almost nothing has been done. To recapitulate, I have written a study on Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage" which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one night be able to write ten verses that are good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), -they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know animals, the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming, to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else), to childhood illnesses that begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not yet enough if one may thing of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white sleeping women in childbeds, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must have been able to fget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until the come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves not til then can it happent hat in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
