Permission for Depression

Duino Elegies

We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our somber evergreen, one
of the seasons of our interior year, - not only
season-they're also place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.

Rilke.

Duino Elegies

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• But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
• It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
• Didn’t their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome,
• quietly come to address you?
• Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,
• as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
• What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death—
• which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

• Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
• to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
• not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
• no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
• to leave even one’s own first name behind,
• forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
• Strange to no longer desire one’s desires.
• Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
• And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
• Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
• they themselves have created.
• Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.