The creations of art always result from a state of having-been-in-danger, from an experience of having-gone-to-the-end, up to the point where no human can go any further. . . .  In this way the art object can be of such tremendous help in the life of the one compelled to create it -- it is his summary:  the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever recurring proof of his unity and truthfulness that is given to no one but himself and whose outward effects appear anonymous, nameless, as nothing but necessity, as reality, as existence.


--Rainer Maria Rilke
(from Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)