Diaries of a young poet (excerpt)

...All of world history's great dramas of heroic ambition you can observe in a single evening sky, more festive and frightful than they ever came to pass. But if your soul does not feed on these things of the past, if it apprehends motion even where motion is not expressed as the jostiling of masses, then it has space and power to discern in each hour a pure, more elemental action in which solemn and calm forces enact selfless gestures without posture and pomp. It will observe that there are far deeper and more unsettling sensations than being reminded by a group of rushing clouds of Lutzow's Hussars or by a mighty river of a dark pirate ship, and it will feel clearly that such memories are signs of a certain immaturity and lack of independence. Why listen so intently to the breathing of yesterday and the day before - since both of them are sleeping and the present moment is awake? Is it any different from thinking, in the face of a mighty and proud granite rock, of the rain that washed over it yesterday?

In this way people betray themselves to be false aristocrats. They believe their wealth consists in celebrating and praising the memory of great ancestors. While all the time they could be so much richer if they celebrated and praised their own possibilities.

For those who talk about a great departed know nothing about him except anecdotes. But those in whom a great ancestor resurrects keep silent about him.

That is why every real one must feel himself to be a first one; for the world whose inception he is knows no history; the fathers and forebears from whom he receives culture and strength and style and aptitude are contemporaries of his soul and are at work in him, not before him. All the others, alas, lived on other stars and died on other stars!

As in general a history of the present would have to comprise whatever things of the past became productive and apparent in later fruitions. What belonged solely to one era gained significance solely for that era, and the so-called historical value is a collector's price not everyone is willing to pay...

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)