Rilke Rainer Maria

I believe our experience of depression, while having been eased in many ways by the focus on science, has also been made harder on that account. Of course depression has never been an easy or welcome experience. But it used to be viewed as an opportunity to come to terms with our lives in new ways. For example, the biblical psalms tell the story of King Saul finding comfort in David s music. Dante s Inferno recounts the tale of young Dante, lost in a dark wood, descending to hell and struggling to find his own way out. The Christian mystics dark night of the soul and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke are other examples of the richness that had been found in the experience we now call depression—richness that the sufferer then shared with the community. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York Vintage, 1980), p. 61. 

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