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RAINER MARIA RILKE

But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept
our existence as far as ever it is possible ; everything, even the
unheard of, must be possible there. That is fundamentally the
only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face
of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that
can befall us. The fact that human beings have been cowardly
in this sense has done endless harm to life ; the experiences that
are called “apparitions”, the whole of the so-called “spirit
world”, death, all these things that are so closely related to us,
have been so crowded out of life by our daily warding them off,
that the senses by which we might apprehend them are stunted.
To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not only
impoverished the existence of the solitary man, it has also
circumscribed the relationships between human beings, as it
were lifted them up from the river bed of infinite possibilities
to a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it
is not only indolence which causes human relationships to repeat
themselves with such unspeakable monotony, unrenewed from
one occasion to another, it is the shyness of any new, incalculable
experience which we do not feel ourselves equal to facing. But
only the man who is prepared for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most unintelligible, will live the relation-
ship with another as something vital, and will himself exhaust
his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the indi-
vidual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most
people get to know only one corner of their room, a window
seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down. In that way
they have a certain security. And yet how much more human
is that insecurity, so fraught with danger, which compels the
prisoners in Poe’s Tales to grope for the shapes of their ghastly
prisons and not to remain unaware of the unspeakable horrors
of their dwelling. But we are not prisoners. No snares and
springes are laid for us, and there is nothing that should alarm or
torment us. We are set in life as in the element with which we
are most in keeping, and we have moreover, through thousands

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