Rilke reconsidered

Funny how things you might have read in your youth might slip through your head--

"Oh, yes, that's interesting, well said. I must remember that."

And as age advances to the point that you have many more years behind you than you have ahead of you, you read it again--

"Wow--that's so profound. Didn't I read this once before? Funny how I forgot it."

As Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet:

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves. . . . For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer. [1]

  

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (HarperOne: 2009), 49.