Beauty & Justice: a letter to Helmut Westhoff

So it is that the majority of people do not know at all how beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the smallest of things, in any flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a birch leaf.  The grown-up people who have professions and concerns, as well as those who agonize over trivialities, gradually lose the eye completely for these treasures, which children, if they are observant and good, notice immediately and love with their whole hearts.  And wouldn't it be most wondrous if all people yearned to remain in this aspect forever like observant and good children, naive and devout in feeling, and if they would never lose the capacity to be so earnestly delighted by a birch leaf or the feather of a peacock or the wing of a hooded crow as much as by grand mountains or a magnificent palace.  The small is only so small as the large is large.  There is a grand and eternal beauty running throughout the whole world, and this is dispersed equitably among small and large things, so then, there is acutely and fundamentally no injustice on the Earth.

Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Helmut Westhoff, Nov. 12, 1901

[trans. A. Badagnani]

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