Our discussion of ordinary days reminded me of this particularly poignant quote:
"If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it: accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls allowed none of the sounds of the world to reach your senses, would you not still always have your childhood, that precious royal richness, that treasure house of memories?"
That is a quote by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke from his book Letters To A Young Poet. It's a compilation of ten letters he sent to a 19 year old poet. I'm no poet, but I am 19, so I've found the book particularly apropos to my life and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Myth, as the precedent to all action, serves as a kind of collective memory in which we all share. A recollection we all posses and can call upon to bring beauty and significance to even the most mundane of circumstances. At the risk of sounding repetitive I echo what I have said in my previous posts; we are irrevocably connected by myth and literature. It is a wonderful thing to be so moved by something written over 100 years ago to a different 19 year old, and then to realize its real significance lies in stories much older.
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