Quote of the Day (7/10/11) (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of that peculiar turn and intensification which our consciousness has taken. By the "Open," therefore, I do not mean sky, air, and space; they, too, are "object" and thus "opaque" and closed to the man who observes and judges. The animal, the flower, presumably is all that, without accounting to itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which perhaps has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents among us only in those first moments of love when one human sees his own vastness in another, his beloved, and in man's elevation toward God.
--Rainer Maria Rilke