These Things whose essential life you want to express first ask you,
"Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me...?"
And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle
of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign
of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart,
entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy,
which makes it so like the constellations in the sky.
In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time
as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which,
through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe,
and which, in that incomparable place, is on the day attended by angels.
"Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me...?"
And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied with even a particle
of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign
of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart,
entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy,
which makes it so like the constellations in the sky.
In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time
as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon which,
through your laborious and exclusive love, is now placed at the center of the universe,
and which, in that incomparable place, is on the day attended by angels.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from a letter to Baladine Klossowska
translated by Stephen Mitchell
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