No Feeling Is Final, So Just Keep Going
Human beings aren’t a destination, Rilke says; therefore, society isn’t one either.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
― Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke1
I’ve never read a poem as much as ‘Go to the Limits of Your Longing’ by Rilke. It’s inexhaustible. And in the last few years, I’ve been reading it aloud more to others than myself. The time and place don’t matter―although it’s usually at a dingy bar after a couple of beers or Old Fashioneds if I’m feeling profligate. If we start chatting, I will likely read this poem to you tipsily.
Interestingly, the reaction’s unfailingly bifurcated. Either people don’t understand it, and I go on a drunk soliloquy on why this is an enchanting poem until one of us gets bored, and we get another drink, subsequently changing topics. Or I’m asked to reread it, particularly this verse:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
I always wondered why these words, in particular, caught people’s eye. And unsurprisingly, this verse defined the poem’s essence for me, too, when I read it first. Perhaps it’s because, from two ostensibly simple lines, Rilke captures the peril of our time whilst giving one an avuncular nudge, advising us to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” (Letters to a Young Poet, P. 14) But even if you think something’s been resolved and questions are answered, he’d say, don’t let it consume you; don’t let resolutions and answers make you lose yourself. You know life through its mystery. We’re incomplete and itinerant beings; we never settle nor find the answers, and nowhere is truly home because “no feeling is final.”
The cultural malady Rilke’s words rebuke is the phenomena of Therapism2 which differs from psychotherapy―a tool we use to “play the game” (as Euwyn Goh says) in the vicissitudes of capitalist society, which is a good coping technique and nothing further. But Therapism is our obsession with trying to psychologise and fix the human condition. The slew of self-help books and podcasts that repackages the same banal message, the myriad mindfulness programs imbued by Western Buddhism’s attempt to cajole people into engaging in so-called ethical consumerism or participating in the amoral global financial system with a “healthy” distance, our endless preoccupation with trauma and, accordingly, how our default solution to every problem is seeing a therapist are manifest examples of the ideology. Since “the political is personal” (as popularised by Carol Hanisch), Therapism’s prescriptions have broader sociocultural implications. Therapists are the priests of modern society to whom you confess your sins or lack thereof. Therapism is the symbolic structure that defines the contours of meaning in our lives. We view the world through its lens; it’s the fabric of our interpersonal, political, cultural, and individual lives. And I label Therapism an ideology as per Slavoj Žižek’s and Louis Althusser’s definition: ideologies are discourses whose primary function is not to make correct statements about reality but to orient our lived relations to and within this constructed false reality.
Human beings aren’t a destination, Rilke says; therefore, society isn’t one either. So the next time the happiness industry sells you the superficial utilitarian answers, quick-psychological fixes or the “red pill”, remind yourself to take a step back and question what you’re being sold; don’t be credulous―be courageous in facing the uncertain, unknown and uncanny. And above all, take Rilke’s words to heart that when one goes to the limits of their longing, one experiences both “beauty and terror.” You can’t have one without the other. Don’t be deceived by neoliberal propaganda that attempts to make you a subservient consumer by giving a safety-first version of life, even love: as Alain Badiou writes, modern love with applications like Tinder or Hinge, dating coaches and courses, speed dating, etc., is telling us to be in love without the fall! It’s a comprehensively risk-free option of love similar to non-alcoholic beer or decaf coffee because the enigmatic algorithms or “love experts” that we bestow metaphysical qualities upon will find the perfect partner for you based on interests, hobbies, tastes, etc. You don’t have to risk the chance encounter or the pain of being rejected. We’re trying to experience the beauty without the terror. Badiou sees this outsourcing of love to the Other as no different to the Military–industrial complex propaganda promoting ideas of drone-based “smart” bombs or “zero-dead” wars. True love, like war, invariably has an element of terror. Such is why when one falls in love, it uproots your life; it’s a terrifying rapture in your existence, and none of the “safety tools” mentioned above will save you.
But going to the limits of longing isn’t about becoming a mindless consumer and commodifying everything, including romantic partners. Rilke would pity the fool that flaunts their luxury cars and mansions online, signalling they’re living the “good life” as if these commodities will fulfil their longing. But the longing he writes off is sublimely intangible, ineffable, and certainly isn’t something you can buy. Perhaps you’ve experienced this in artistic and intellectual expression when the whole of your being tells you this is momentarily what you’re supposed to do; nothing else matters, it’s beyond ecstasy, time stops becoming linear, and you find eternity in temporality. And indeed, you experience this when loving someone with a deep longing for them. Such love is choosing to know your lover in infinite ways whilst being completely aware of the pain that comes with it. As Slavoj Žižek states, love isn’t about idealising a person but accepting them with all of their stupidities, failures, ugliness, etc., and declaring nonetheless, “You are absolute!” Because you are my longing, I’m willing to face terror for you despite all the options; despite all the people I can be with, I choose you. In our consumerist happiness-obsessed culture, where we’re told to keep desiring more, this is an ultimate subversion of the social order. So, in that vein, such love is even a political act.
Of course, as Christianity tells us, love should apply to every aspect of your life, not only romance. Christ made love metaphysical. Therefore, one ought to feel the Rilkean longing for the world; as William Blake writes in Auguries of Innocence:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
You ought to be captivated by the beautiful terror of existence. And hopefully, this captivation moves you towards political action too, where you partake intensely in life and fight for a more just and egalitarian society―not withdraw and resign from the world and focus on yourself like how contemporary self-help-Stoicism wrongly tells us. So “let everything happen to you.” Because terror, sadness and angst are a part of life, but so are beauty, joy and revelation. And, of course, farce; one should never forget to laugh at life’s absurdity. Don’t shy away from anything as “nearby is the country they call life”, and it’s worth keeping going to see what unravels.
Source: The Book of Hours: I, 59. (n.d.) The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Feb 17 2023, from https://www.thefreelibrary.com