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Fear of the Inexplicable

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverishedthe existence of the individual; the relationship betweenone human being and another has also been cramped by it,as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens.

For it is not inertia alonethat is responsible for human relationships repeatingthemselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous andunrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeableexperience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustivelyfrom his own existence.

For if we think of this existence ofthe individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, aplace by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down.

Thus they have a certain security.

And yet that dangerousinsecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeonsand not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners.

No traps or snares are set aboutus, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.

We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to bedistinguished from all that surrounds us.

We have no reason tomistrust our world, for it is not against us.

Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels usthat we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trustand find most faithful.

How should we be able to forget thoseancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesseswho are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

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Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist. He is "widely recogn…
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