Balm for failed revolutionists

[Paul Mackin]

Ran across a quote from Rilke (or at least it's purported to be) which 
might possibly lift the spirits of the student revolutionists of the 60s 
or even of the present day. It appeared in a slightly unlikely place--an a
interview with Tim O'Reilly the well-known publisher of computer books 
principally dealing with the Unix and Linux operating systems and related
software. Tim is a champion of the Open Source Software movement and was
speaking in the context of the historic and in some ways very unevenly
matched battle going on between the propriatary and the non-propriatary
software producers. Since it seems to me that fighting and defeating
Microsoft in this fray  would be only slightly easier than toppling U.S. 
capitalism--and since it IS Rilke afterall--I thought the
quote might be appropriate for the p-list.

"Somehow that reminds me of a Rilke quote that my friends now make fun of
because they hear it  from me so much. In his poem "The Man Watching," he
describes Jacob's Biblical wrestling match with an angel, and concludes
with something like this: "What we fight with is so small, and when
we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by
successively  greater things."


(not sure the wording of the passage come through exactly right but I
think it's close enough to make the point--hope it doesn't sound too
defeatist--dare we think P might approve?)

		P.