15th October 2011

“Although ordinary life demands courage, sometimes in exceptional amounts, there is yet another kind of courage required for the task of being human: the courage to meet the new and to accept the different in the chances of experience. Rilke gave luminous expression to this idea in his Letters to a Young Poet, by saying that we need 'courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we encounter.' He meant the courage to accept love when it offers, to face death when it comes, to bear the burdens that life imposes in return for its gifts, and above all the courage to create something to mark our own individual responses to the world, however modest; for even when the courage to do this is unostentatious and private, it can make a crucial difference to the content or the quality of our lives.”

A. C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things