My "Touchstone" Moment

Since I became a declared "English Major", I've reached countless epiphanies via "touchstone" passages that we discussed in class pertaining to matthew arnold's essay. But the first work that ever had a memorable and lasting literary impact on me was Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet", that I talked about in a previous blog. However I'm unable to single out just one touchstone moment from the letters, they're all too important and relevant! here are the ones that I hold the most dear:

"Things are not at all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures" (chapter 1)

"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating." (ch. 3)

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to 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 day into the answer." (ch. 4)

"Only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love." (ch. 6)

"Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown." (ch 8)