as I battle the dreaded insomnia again, and again, and again in its usual cycle of (hopefully) around three months, I find myself crashing in my blue-room, a kind of study-come-boudoir with a very comfy couch bed and a the ever-present pattern of leaves on the window from a large tree outside. At 3am, or 4am, I'll creep in, too restless to inflict my twitchy feet on Husband, but clearly also too restless to attempt sleep.
With the light on soft and a dim view of the street, I again, as always come Autumn, pick up poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that all is sacred, can be sublime. That he does this with reference to a God he knows but has no secular faith in, that he does this as merely a conduit to the sensual and only then the sublime, is why I must return. He knew secular faith but could not feel it, he felt the sensual world and mastered a prose that steps back from being a knowing guide - it is his observance alone that takes us freely to our own realizations, Yes, that is so, just like that- YES!
I am stunned, always, by the modernity of him, and yet how well he fits an epoch of deep introspection, critical thought and a tradition of intellectual questioning.
All that nestled in the sheer beauty and familiarity of his prose, so new, so sure, so skin-felt and heart-drummed. To be so taken up, out and through by words still quite stuns me.
I can imagine no better antidote to 3am restlessness. If you haven't, please do.
