Quotation Station: Rilke and Joseph Campbell

I heard this Rilke quote on an episode of On Being with Joanna Macy. It's the shit.

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouty
January 23, 1924

And this had been bouncing in my head - the final passage in the first chapter of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Ton of Faces. Shit is ill elegant.

"Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."