You Are the Future

Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke

Mark S. Burrows & Stephanie Dowrick

Paperback
978-1-958972-53-3
US $24.99 Edelweiss Bookshop Amazon Barnes & Noble
eBook available
October 2024

Following Rilke’s advice to “live the questions," this book invites us to draw upon his startling insights and often unconventional wisdom to see ourselves as ripening, unfolding, and always becoming.

“This is a book to savor, soaking up the rewards of stories, insights, and provocations about the passage of our lives." —Sally Gillespie, author of Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our World and Ourselves

"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”

Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry has inspired readers for more than a century, and never more so than now. His rare spiritual vision speaks uniquely in a time when many are seeking freedom of thought and a more wholistic way of living. Written by two award-winning writers who have journeyed deeply with Rilke, this book invites readers—with Rilke—to “live” the deep questions facing us in our day, embracing the poet’s refusal to reach for simplistic “answers.” Through the originality and insight of their writing, Burrows and Dowrick honor readers’ own experiences and, in conversation with Rilke, invite them to examine their lives and “desire the change,” as the poet put it. In so doing, they bring sublime poetry into the heart of daily life, where the gifts it carries are most needed. All translations are by Mark S. Burrows, a widely respected Rilke scholar and translator.

“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