Rilke Life in Circles Phone Case

"I live my life in circles that grow wide and endlessly unroll."

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905, tr. Jessie Lemont, 1918)

The Book of Hours returns to the same image, the same question, each time from a slightly different angle. This line opens that motion. The poem isn't about expansion as progress — it's about the shape of a life that doesn't travel in a straight line toward mastery. The circles grow. They don't close.

The Design

The warm burnished arcs sweeping from the upper right aren't decoration — they make the poem's image visual. Concentric curves radiating outward, left open, never completing.

The motion of the circle is the point — not arriving at its end. The quote sits inside that movement.

About This Case

• Tough dual-layer construction — flexible TPU inner layer, hard polycarbonate outer shell
• Raised edges protect the screen and camera
• Induction charging compatible — works with most wireless devices
• Available for iPhone 11 through iPhone 17 Pro Max
• Care note: Keep away from liquids with high alcohol content and prolonged direct sunlight to preserve the design.

Who It's For

The reader who marks the margins. The thinker who returns to the same question from a new angle and is not embarrassed by it. The one who understands that a life that spirals outward is not a life that has lost direction — it's a life in motion.

Carry the orbit.

More in this set: Life in Circles Tee and Life in Circles Tumbler.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Plain English

• Lived 1875–1926, born in Prague; among the most translated of German-language poets
• Met Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1897 — she persuaded him to change his name from René to Rainer and shaped his early reading
• Spent much of his adult life moving between Russia, Paris, and Switzerland
• The translation here is Jessie Lemont's 1918 version — the first English Book of Hours, and the one in the public domain