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My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
Quoteiac

My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Phone Case

Sale price$32.00

Poem 6 of Das Stunden-Buch describes the ordinary day, seen from a late hour, as something already finished and far off — the way an old letter reads. The phone in your hand is where most of us do that now.

“I love my life’s dark hours…”
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905), Book I, poem 6

— Jessie Lemont translation, 1918. Public domain.

Context

Scrolling back through a day at midnight is the modern version of the poem’s move. The events are only hours old and they already belong to someone else.

What the poem does with that distance is refuse to treat it as a loss. Seen from far enough back, a day stops being a list of things that went well or badly and turns into something you can actually read.

Who It’s For

You’re the one still awake, holding the only lit thing in the room, going back over the day at your own pace.

You read poets rather than motivational accounts, and you’d rather carry a sentence that means something than a pattern that matches your bag.

Take it with you.

The Design

The line stops early. Printed here it is only the opening — I love my life’s dark hours… — and the ellipsis is doing real work: at this size, the half you can read is the half you remember, and the rest arrives on its own.

Behind and through the words is the mark the whole Dark Hours set shares: an ensō, the Zen circle drawn in one breath and left open on purpose, which also reads as a moon — weighted along one edge, thinning to nothing along the other. Pewter is the only value that lets it cross the cream letters without swallowing them. The black covers the entire shell, sides included; the mark itself stays centred on the back, clear of the curve.

About This Case

  • Dual-layer construction — flexible inner liner inside a hard polycarbonate shell
  • Raised edges around the screen and camera
  • Wireless charging compatible with most Qi-enabled devices

Keep away from prolonged direct sunlight and high-alcohol liquids to preserve the design.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Plain English

  • Lived 1875–1926 — born in Prague, wrote in German, and spent his working life between Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland
  • Worked in Paris as Auguste Rodin’s secretary in 1905–06; watching a sculptor work changed how he wrote about looking at things
  • Das Stunden-Buch was written in three short bursts — 1899, 1901 and 1903 — and published in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in 1905
  • Letters to a Young Poet — ten letters written between 1903 and 1908 to a young military cadet who had sent him poems and asked if they were any good — was published in 1929 and is still widely read
  • Robert Bly’s later English version opens this line “I love the dark hours of my being.” The wording printed here is Jessie Lemont’s, from 1918 — the version in the public domain

More from this collection

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My Life’s Dark Hours — Rainer Maria Rilke — phone case — the quiet mind — black — front — Quoteiac
My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Phone Case Sale price$32.00