After Each Creative Act One Has To

Here, Beside This Great Black Surface That Is My Desk, I Feel As Though I Am On A Desert Island.

By 'coming To Terms With Life' I Mean: The Reality Of Death Has Become A Definite Part Of My Life; My Life Has, So To Speak, Been Extended By Death, By My Looking Death In The Eye And Accepting It, By Accepting Destruction As Part Of Life And No Longer Wasting My Energies On Fear Of Death Or The Refusal To Acknowledge Its Inevitability. It Sounds Paradoxical: By Excluding Death From Our Life We Cannot Live A Full Life, And By Admitting Death Into Our Life We Enlarge And Enrich It.

I Feel Like A Small Battlefield In Which The Problems, Or Some Of The Problems, Of Our Time Are Being Fought Out. All One Can Hope To Do Is Keep Oneself Humbly Available, To Allow Oneself To Be A Battlefield. After All, The Problems Must Be Accommodated, Have Somewhere To Struggle And Come To Rest And We, Poor Little Humans, Must Put Our Inner Space At Their Service And Not Run Away.

A Large Group Of Us Were Crowded Into The Gestapo Hall, And At That Moment The Circumstances Of All Our Lives Were The Same. All Of Us Occupied The Same Space, The Men Behind The Desk No Less Than Those About To Be Questioned. What Distinguished Each Of Us Was Only Our Inner Attitude.

Slowly But Surely I Have Been Soaking Rilke Up These Last Few Months: The Man, His Work And His Life. And That Is Probably The Only Right Way With Literature, With Study, With People Or With Anything Else: To Let It All Soak In, To Let It All Mature Slowly Inside You Until It Has Become A Part Of Yourself. That, Too, Is A Growing Process. Everything Is A Growing Process. And In Between, Emotions And Sensations That Strike You Like Lightning. But Still The Most Important Thing Is The Organic Process Of Growing.