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Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

by Parker · 77 things on Twos

"Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you l ives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good . His life has much difficulty and sadness . . . . Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words."
Where a great and unique man speaks, small men should keep silence.
One
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward , and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief i n some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself. the things in your environment. the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.
If one could live without writing: then one must not attempt it at all.
Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you can not disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your in most feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
Two
Jens Peter Jacobsen
Six Stories of J. P. Jacobsen
Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen
Three
Marie Grubbe
Read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism-such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means. not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come . But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
Four
If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it-but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom). then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.
Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience. which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments. Men have made even eating into something else: want on the one hand, superfluity upon the other, have dimmed the distinctness of this need, and all the deep, simple necessities in which life renews itself have become similarly dulled. But the individual can clarify them for himself and live them clearly (and if not the individual, who is too dependent, then at least the solitary man). He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and longing, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding.
Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with sweetsounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different; love in them life in an unfamiliar form and be considerate of aging people, who fear that being-alone in which you trust. Avoid contributing material to the drama that is always stretched taut between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's energy and consumes the love of their elders. which is effective and warming even if it does not comprehend. Ask no advice from them and count upon no understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing, out beyond which you do not have to step in order to go very far!
Five
No notes
Six
Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future-only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.
Be glad and confident.
Seven
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it. everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little. but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation .
For this reason young people. who are beginners in everything, can not yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces. gathered close about their lonely, timid. upward-beating heart. they must learn to love.
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude. intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?). it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself. to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion. And then what? What is life to do to this heap of half-battered existence which they call their communion and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that wanted still to come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, divining things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come any more, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty, and rescue in one of the many conventions that have been put up in great number like public refuges a long this most dangerous road.
And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
Eight
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living.
And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still. more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us. so much the better do we make it ours. so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others). we shall feel in our in most selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary-and toward this our development will move gradually-that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us.
We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far.
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
If there is anything morbid in your processes . just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick. to have its whole sickness and break out with it. for that is its progress.
Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.
Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.
Nine
Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom.
And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don't give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.
Ten
No notes
Chronicle, 1903-1908
"The life of one that laboureth and i s contented shall be made sweet." - Ecclesiasticus
Introduction
Interim
Letter One
I must wait in stillness for the sounding. I know that if I force it it will not come at all. (It has come so seldom in the last two years.) . . . on bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse-heavy that I can not write with them not even a letter. Is that bad, weak? And yet God wills it so with me.
Letter Two
The sea did him good; "it cleanses me with its noise and lays a rhythm upon everything in me that is disturbed and confused ." When at times, to his surprise, it seemed not so beneficial, "too loud and too incessant," he would withdraw into the woods where he had found a great reclining tree root on which he "sat for hours as alone as on the first day of the world."
"Everyone must find in his work the center of his life and thence be able to grow out radially as far as may be. And no one else may watch him in the process . . . for not even he himself may do that. There is a kind of cleanness and virginity in it, in this looking away from oneself: it is as though one were drawing, one's gaze bound to the object, inwoven with Nature, while one's hand goes its own way somewhere below, goes on and on, gets timid, wavers, is glad again, goes on and on far below the face that stands like a star above it, not looking, only shining. I feel as though I had always worked that way; face gazing at far things, hands alone. And so it surely ought to be. I shall be like that again in time."
Letter Three
Letter Four
He knows-he is now twenty-seven-that he still lacks the discipline for which he longs in order to work. "Have I not the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that hampers all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life going. And still nothing has happened yet, nothing real is around me yet."
Letter Five
Letter Six
“The happiness of being a beginner, which I hold to be the greatest, is small beside the fear of beginning . . . . ”
"It really seems as though things were quieting down around me. and even if my nerves. which are jumpy, sometimes dread disturbance from outside or uncertainty in health, there is yet much in me that is gathering itself together, and my longing to do something good, something really good, was never so great as now. I feel as though I had been sleeping for years or had been lying in the lowest hold of a ship that, loaded with heavy things, sailed through strange distances-- Oh to climb up on deck once more and feel the winds and the birds, and to see how the great, great nights come with their gleaming stars . . . "
Letter Seven
Art is . . . a longest road through life. and when I think how slight and beginnerish what I have done till now is, I am not surprised that this production (which resembles a strip of half-tilled field a foot wide) does not sustain me. For plans bear no fruit, and seed prematurely sown does not sprout. But patience and work are real and can at any moment be transformed into bread.
To stick to my work and have every confidence in it, this I am learning from his great and greatly given example, as I learn patience from him; it is true, my experience tells me over and over that I haven't much strength to reckon with, for which reason I shall, so long as it is in any way possible, not do two things, not separate livelihood and work, rather try to find both in the one concentrated effort: only thus can my life become something good and necessary and heal together out of the tattered state for which heredity and immaturity have been responsible. into one bearing trunk.
Therefore I shall determine my next place of abode, all else aside, from the point of view of work and that only. I want this the more. since I feel myself in the midst of developments and transitions (changes that affect observation and creation equally). which may slowly lead to that toujours travailler with which all outer and inner difficulties. dangers and confusions would really be in a certain sense overcome . . . for whoever ca n always work, can live too, must be able to."
"And over and above all this I feel: if anyone needs seclusion, it is I."
Letter Eight
That life has unending possibilities of renewal. Yes, but this too: that the using of strength in a certain sense is always increase of strength also; for fundamentally we have to do only with a wide cycle: all strength that we give away comes over us again, experienced and altered. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there, truly done, that is not prayer?
So lovely, you see, can rest be, and so it looks alongside work. Not disquieting, but so that one gathers a deep confidence and the feel of a big time.
Letter Nine
Letter Ten
It is a good moment at which to leave him, calmer, more content, because he is working.