For they are the moments when something new has entered into us,
something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us
withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the
midst of it and is silent.
--
We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs
indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform
itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be
lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and
stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than
that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if
from outside.
--
As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are
even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands
firm … but we move in infinite space.
--
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have
courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that
we may encounter.
Rainer Maria Rilke
