Friday, September 10, 2010

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
- Rainer Rilke

I've returned to my habit of bedtime reading. Since the move:
Letters to a Young Poet
Dirt. The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth.
The Last American Man
Illusions. The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.
Spiral Jetta

3 comments:

Jon said...

Inspiring quote and a great practice. And you mentioned one of my favs, Illusions.

jbmoore said...

Sent this to George as well from DailyZen:



There's no self and no person,
How then kinfolk and stranger!
I beg you, cease going from lecture to lecture;
It's better to seek truth directly.
The nature of Diamond Wisdom
Excludes even a speck of dust.
From "Thus have I heard," to "This I believe,"
All's but an array of unreal names.

- Layman P'ang (740-808)

You are stuck going to lectures, but it's up to you to be original and creative and switch roles with your teachers. Good luck and enjoy the intellectual stimulation!

anonymous julie said...

It is strange and difficult to switch modes from art analysis and theory to art-making. But a lot of my work lately is made without mind.

"Seek truth directly"... indeed. And yet it is not always needful, I think, to turn the tables on the teacher. It is the rare person that I would even accept as such.