In Rilke, we encounter a poet who holds together what often seems at odds: youth and wisdom; focus and freedom; devotion and doubt; God and the self. With Mark S. Burrows and Stephanie Dowrick we are in the safe hands of writers who are sensitive to this exquisite tension of Rilke’s vision, and who also hold it themselves: their scholarship has the quality of music; their spiritual insights have the character of hospitality; their openings are appealing to the expert and the newcomer alike. With their combined knowledge of literature and culture, spirituality and poetry, their offering in You Are the Future beckons us to discover a wise way to live a life in the company of self and others.”—Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, peace activist, and host of On Being’s “Poetry Unbound”
“This is a magnificent book, so generous, wise and loving. Anchored in the lived questions that Rilke celebrated, You Are the Future opens to fertile places for soul-making and heart-opening. Stephanie Dowrick and Mark Burrows each bring their lifetime of experience and scholarship to create a book for your lifetime of reading and reflection. Never could there be a timelier moment than now to take a deep dive into poetry of the soul, accompanied by writers of great heart, and with translations that sing of authenticity and inspiration. This is a book to savour, soaking up the rewards of stories, insights, and provocations about the passage of our lives. It illuminates the ways of the world, and the capacity of poetry to hold us when all else falls away.”—Sally Gillespie, Ph.D., author of Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our World and Ourselves
“You Are the Future shows with piercing insight how Rilke’s life and poetry offer a therapy of soul-making, a way of living soulfully in dark times—and what seem, at times, to be end-times—by living into your deepest questions. Dowrick and Burrows have written not just a book to peruse at one’s leisure. They have written a text that invites and even demands meditative attention. It is inspired and inspiring, insightful, and wise. Reading it I live the questions of my life, my work, and my relationships by sinking into the stillness of solitude and the serenity of silence. Then I began to hear the song that attunes my life to the breathing of all nature of which I am a part.”—Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D., author of Leaning Toward the Poet: Eavesdropping on the Poetry of Everyday Life
“From the first page of You Are the Future, I felt an aperture widening, both depth and dimension magnified, and was drawn into a more nuanced understanding of Rilke, yes, but also of some of the most perplexing questions about living a wiser way in these often soul-numbing times. All the way through to the very last page, I never lost a sense of amazement that poetry written a century ago held such profound and timeless wisdom for this incongruous moment in human history. In so many ways, this might be one book to never put down.”—Barbara Mahany, writer, book-review editor, and author of Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door
“You Are the Future guides us into Rilke's work through the details of his life and, in doing so, invites robust self-examination. Burrows’ and Dowrick's writing mirrors Rilke's tender urgency, rejecting both the inattention and easy answers that consume our world. Nothing infuriated Rilke half as much as squandered life. This masterful book dares the reader to live the questions, but cannot promise we'll like what we find. Like all great art, it only offers truth—but extends that in abundance.” —Benjamin Perry, award-winning author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter
“Two internationally renowned Rilke scholars bring their life-long pondering on and resonance with the poet’s spiritual wisdom, a way of living shaped by awe, listening, and praise. Their probing of his ‘wiser way’ refuses to build a ‘Rilke Museum,’ inviting us rather to join the adventure of following his vision of ‘living the questions’ so that we, too, might become what he described as the ‘bees of the invisible.” —Prof. Gotthard Fermor, editor of Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch (Gütersloh, 2014 – 2018) and Ekstasis
Praise for the author's previous book:
“Dowrick’s In the Company of Rilke is lovely: serious, informed, honest, warm, delightful to read. Stephanie Dowrick has accomplished something wonderful, bring bringing us into the company of the most human of men and into the presence of his astonishingly beautiful poetry.”—John Armstrong, author, with Alain de Botton, of Art as Therapy
2024-09-05
Burrows and Dowrick tease out the timeless wisdom of a beloved poet in this nonfiction work.
For over a century, the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke—the Austrian poet who died in 1926—have encouraged readers to embrace life’s contradictions. “He himself saw language as a tool of inquiry,” write the authors in their introduction, “sent out like a ‘probe’ to the limits of human imagination and experience as ‘bees of the invisible,’ as he once famously put it. This adds up to a quite new way not just of seeing life, but of more fully embracing and valuing it.” With this book, Burrows and Dowrick use Rilke’s writings to explore topics like beginnings, questions, and mistakes. The chapters, which can be read in any order (the authors alternate writing duties), operate as self-contained essays, each inspired by a particular quote from one of Rilke’s poems or letters. The chapter titled “Where Do I Belong,” for example, begins with Rilke’s haunting poem “Entrance,” which Dowrick uses as a launching pad to consider the tensions of conformity and belonging. (Her close reading of the poem draws in ideas from Rumi and John O’Donovan as well as her husband’s work as a pediatrician among the First Nations of Australia’s Northern Territory.) Burrows and Dowrick are correct in their assertion that Rilke’s words have a surprisingly contemporary resonance. Though they sometimes consider Rilke’s words within the context of his own life and time, more often they look outward, which can occasionally lead to broad or slightly cliche insights like, “Finding a way to be curious, to be open to the unknown, to be ready to be surprised is not the goal of life’s journey. It is that journey itself.” Worse, they occasionally get caught in loops of abstracted self-help speak: “Such self-honoring may become a chance to discover the fertile wisdom already waiting in your own life, plus how to live into its depths.” More a book for readers of motivational nonfiction than for fans of literature, this work will undoubtedly bring new audiences to the great poet.
A thoughtful if imperfect primer on Rilke for the self-improvement minded.
