Jacqueline Spano

“You see, I am one who likes to look for things.

I am one who, barely noticed,
like a shepherd,
comes up from behind …
One who dreams of making you complete,
and in that way completes himself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am very concerned
when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of
touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with
memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch
with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and
affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this
incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside
of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours.
You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on
his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected
of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just
convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your
existence”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are imbedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all absorbing activity, passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own centre. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorance of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashion in order to live securely and serenely.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’13 We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World