To have come through it: to have joyfully survived even the happiness—quietly, completely. First the testings were mute, then verbal. Who could look back unamazed? No one has been able, since life lasts because no one could. —But the infiniteness of the attempts! The new greenness of birch trees is not so new as that which befalls us. A wood dove coos. And again what you suffered seems, ah, as if yet unlived-through. The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle of the call. Awake and weakened.
Poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Uncollected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected and Translated by Edward Snow