I
LOVE INSEEING
I love inseeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious
it is to insee, for example, a dog as one passes by.
Insee (I don’t mean in-spect, which is only
a kind of human gymnastic, by means of which one immediately
comes out again on the other side of the dog, regarding
it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the humanity
lying behind it, not that,) — but to let oneself
precisely into the dog’s very center, the point
from which it becomes a dog, the place in it where
God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment
when the dog was finished, in order to watch it under
the influence of its first embarrassments and inspirations
and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking,
that it could not have been better made. . . . Laugh
though you may, dear confidant, if I am to tell you
where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my
earthly bliss was to be found, I must confess to you:
it was to be found time and again, here and there,
in such timeless moments of this divine inseeing.
Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, translated by J.B.
Leishman
— Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, translated
by J.B. Leishman