The Tenth Letter

“…I can only wish that you trustingly and patiently allow that grand solitude to work in you. It is no longer possible to be erased from your life. It shall be immanent in all that you experience and all that you do. It will act as an anonymous influence, akin to how ancestral blood constantly moves and merges with our own and links with that of the individual, never to be unlinked. It is gently decisive at each crossroad of our life…

…Art also is only a way of life, and we can, no matter how we live, and without knowing it, prepare ourselves for it. With each encounter with truth one draws nearer to reaching communion with it, more so than those in unreal, half-artistic careers—by pretending proximity to art. All those in the field of journalism and nearly all critics do it, as well as three-fourths of those engaged in literature, or who wish to call it that. I am glad that you have overcome the danger of being caught up in such a realm, and that you are somewhere in a rugged reality alone and courageous”

The Ninth Letter

“…It is always my wish that you might find enough patience within you to endure, and enough innocence to have faith…that you might gain more and more trust in whatever is difficult for you, in your aloneness, among other things. Allow life to happen to you…life is right in all cases.

…All feelings that integrate and inspire are pure. Impure is the feeling that touches only one side of your being and is tearing you up so…Everything that causes you to be more than you have been in your best hours is right. Every advancement is good if it pervades your whole bloodstream, when it is not due to intoxication, not due to being conditioned to sadness, but to transparent joy…

You doubt can become a good attribute if you discipline it. It must become a knowing; it must become the critic. Ask it, as often as it wishes to spoil something, why something is ugly. Demand proof of it, test it, and you will find it perhaps perplexed and confused, perhaps also in protest. But don’t give in; demand arguments. Act with alertness and responsibility, each and every time, and the day will come when doubt will change from a destroyer to become one of you best fellow workers, perhaps the wisest of all that have a part in building your life. …of life and death…both are great and wonderful.

The Eighth Letter

***The first three letters were posted in "10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas" in December 2009. Unfortunately the rest of the ten letters weren't posted by then, so here's the rest of this very profound writing for your enlightenment.

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“…You have encountered many very sad experiences, which by now have passed…Please, dear friend, think about this: Did not this great sadness rather pass through you? Did not much within you change?…The only sad experiences which are dangerous and bad are those that one reveals to people in order to drown them out. Like illnesses treated superficially and incompetently, they retreat and, after a short pause, break out even more intensely. They gather together within the self and are life. They are life unlived, ridiculed and scorned…

…I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of tension. We perceive them as crippling because we no longer hear signs of life from our estranged emotions. We are alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our presence. For a moment everything intimate and familiar has been taken from us. We stand in the midst of a transition, where we cannot remain standing.

And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us…has entered out heart…into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either — it is already in the blood. And we do not find out what it was. One could easily make us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it. We cannot say who came; we shall perhaps never know. But many signals affirm that the future has stepped into us in such a way as to change itself into us, and that long before it manifests itself outwardly.

Therefore it is so important to be alone and observant when one is sad. The seemingly uneventful moment, when our future really enters in, is very much closer to reality than that other loud and fortuitous point in time, when it happens as if coming from the outside. The quieter and more patient, the more open we are when we are sad, the more resolutely does that something new enter into us, the deeper it is absorbed in us, the more certain we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our personal destiny…our evolvement will gradually go in that direction: nothing strange shall befall us, but rather that which has already for a long time belonged to us.

…it is possible that we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate emerges from human beings; it does not enter into them from the outside. It is only because so many did not absorb their destinies while they lived in them, did not transform them into themselves, that they did not recognize what emerged from them. Their fate was so strange to them that in their confused fright they believed it must just now have entered into them. For they swore never before to have found anything similar within themselves. As people were mistaken so long about the movement of the sun, so it is that people are yet mistaken about the movement of what is to come. The future stands firm and still…but we are moving in infinite space.

Why should we not encounter difficulties?
To return to the subject of aloneness: It becomes increasingly clear that it is basically not something we can choose to have or not have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one’s self and act as though it were not so — that is all. How much better…that we concede we are solitary beings… Our minds will certainly reel at the thought, for all points on which we could heretofore focus shall be taken from us. There is nothing near and familiar left us; everything is in the distance, unendingly far away.

A person would have a similar feeling, were he…taken from his home and placed on…a high mountain. It would be a feeling of unequaled uncertainty — a vulnerability to a nameless something would nearly destroy him…

Some of these changes cause many to lose all perspective…as with the man on the pinnacle of the mountain…But it is necessary that we experience that also. We must accept our existence to the greatest extent possible; everything, the unprecedented also...That is…the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing that we could encounter.

The fact that people have been cowards in that regard has caused infinite harm to life. The experiences that one calls ‘ghosts,’ the entire spirit world, death, all these related things have been forced out of life through daily resistance to such an extent that the senses with which we could grasp them have become atrophied. And that is not even considering the question of God.

The fear of the unexplainable not only impoverished the existence of the individual, but also caused the relationships of one person to another to be limited…For it is inertia alone that causes the unspeakably monotonous and unrenewed human condition to repeat itself again and again. It is the aversion to anything new, any unpredictable experienced, which is believed to be untenable.

Only he who can expect anything, who does not exclude even the mysterious, will have a relationship to life greater than just being alive; he will exhaust his own wellspring of being… …every uncertainty fraught with danger is so much more human. It is the same uncertainty that motivated the prisoners in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories to explore the form of their terrible prisons and not be a stranger to the unspeakable horrors of their presence there.

But we are not prisoners. There are no traps or snares set for us…We are placed into life, into the element best suited to it. Besides, through thousands of years of adaptation, we have acquired such a resemblance to this life, that we, if we stood still, would hardly be distinguishable from our surroundings. We have not reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our own terrors…if we fashion our life according to that principle, which advises us to embrace that which is difficult, then that which appears to us to be the very strangest will become the most worthy of our trust, and the truest.

How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous. Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.

You must not be frightened…when a sadness arises within you of such magnitude as you have never experienced, or when restlessness overshadows all you do, like light and the shadow of clouds gliding over your hand. You must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety…grief…melancholy from you life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed? You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, then consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign to it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress…

…Do not scrutinize yourself too closely. Do not draw conclusions too quickly from that which is happening to you. Just allow it to happen. Otherwise you might easily begin to look with blame…upon your past, which, of course, is very much a part of everything that you encounter now…The influences of the vagaries, the wishes and the longings of you boyhood upon your present life are not the ones you remember or pass judgment on. The unusual conditions of a lonely and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, vulnerable to so many influences, and at the same time so distant from all real connections with life, that, whenever a vice may have entered, one may not simply call it a vice. One must, in any case, be very careful with that nomenclature. It is often the name of the crime upon which a life shatters, not the nameless and personal act itself at all. It might have been a definite necessity of this person’s life, of which he may simply have availed himself.

The expending of effort seems so important to you only because you value victory too much…It is not the ‘great thing’ that you believe to have achieved, even though you have a right to your feelings. The great thing is that there was something already present—and you were allowed to substitute it in place of your misconceptions—something true and real. Without it your victory also would have just been a mere moral reaction without meaning. As it is, it has become a chapter in your life…

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? ...That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

The Seventh Letter

***The first three letters were posted in "10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas" in December 2009. Unfortunately the rest of the ten letters weren't posted by then, so here's the rest of this very profound writing for your enlightenment.

Letters to a young poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

“…It is the best of your verses that I have had the privilege to read. …now I shall give you my copy of them, for I know that it is important…a new experience to find one’s own work again in someone else’s handwriting. Read these verses as though you had never seen them before…you will feel…how very much they are your own…

…Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms. People have, with the help of so many conventions, resolved everything the easy way, on the easiest side of easy. But it is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us…The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.

To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people — who are beginners in everything — cannot yet love; they do not know how...Thus to love constantly and far into a lifespan is…heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.

Love does not at first have anything to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being — for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity, and lack of coherence? Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one’s horizon greatly. Only in this sense, as the task to work on themselves…and to listen, ought young people use the love granted them. Opening one’s self, and surrendering, and every kind of communion are not for them yet, they must for a …very long time gather and harbor experience. It is the final goal, perhaps one which human beings as yet hardly ever seek to attain.

Young people often err…since it is their nature to be impatient…

…They lose perspective and limit opportunities…Society has known how to create every kind of refuge conceivable. Since it is inclined to perceive love…as entertainment, it needs to display it as easily available, inexpensive, safe, and reliable, just like common public entertainment…

…Questions of love are personal, intimate questions, from one person to another, that in every case require a new, special, and an exclusively personal answer…

…Whoever will seriously consider the question of love will find that, as with the question of death…there is no enlightened answer… not the hint of a path has yet been found…no comforting principle…none finding general agreement.

But to the same degree that we as individuals begin to explore life…these deep things surface for each of us in greater intimacy…the difficult work of love demands of our evolvement overwhelms us; it is larger than life. We, as yet beginners, are not equal to it. If we persevere after all, and take this love upon us, accepting it as a burden and a time of training, instead of losing ourselves to the frivolous and careless game behind which people have hidden themselves, not willing to face the most serious question of their being — then perhaps shall a small bit of progress be perceptible as well as some relief for those to come after us…”

The Sixth Letter

***The first three letters were posted in "10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas" in December 2009. Unfortunately the rest of the ten letters weren't posted by then, so here's the rest of this very profound writing for your enlightenment.

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“You should not be without a greeting from me at Christmastime, when in the midst of the festivities your feeling of aloneness is apt to weigh more heavily upon you. Whenever you notice that it looms large, then be glad about it. For what would aloneness be…if it did not possess greatness? There exists only one aloneness, …and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for…most banal camaraderie… the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish. Its growth is painful as the growing up of a young boy and sad as the emergence of springtime.

…what you need is…inner solitude. To go within and for hours not to meet anyone…To be lonely as one was lonely as a child, while adults were moving about…—that must be the goal. And when you realize one day that their activities are superficial, that their careers are paralyzed and no longer linked with life,…why not look at the world as a child would see it—out of the depths of your own world, out of the breadth of your own aloneness…?

…reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. And name this thinking what you wish. It might be recollections of your childhood or yearning for your own future…observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you. Your innermost happening is worth all your love.

Do not expend too much courage or time to clarify your position to others…The individual person who senses his aloneness…only he, is…subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws…

…draw close to those things that will not ever leave you. The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees...Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate. The children too, are still the same as you were as a child, sad and happy in the same way…if you think about your childhood, then you can again live among…the lonely children—where the adults count for nothing...

And if it is distressing…for you to think of your childhood…of the simplicity and silence so close akin to it, because you no longer believe in God…ask yourself…whether you have really lost God. Is it not…that you have not yet possessed him? …when could that have been? Do you think a child can hold him, …whose weight crushes the aged ones...that the one possessing him could lose him like a little stone? Or do you not…agree that he who might have him could be lost by him? …if you conclude that he did not exist in your childhood and not before that…and if you, with great dismay, feel that he does not exist, even during this hour…what right have you then to miss him, like someone out of the past, him, who never existed, and to seek him as though he were lost?

Why don’t you think of him as the coming one, who has been at hand since eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree, with us as its leaves? ...Don’t you see that everything that happens becomes a beginning again and again? Could it not be his beginning, since a beginning in itself is always so beautiful? If, however, he is the most perfect one, would not what is less than perfect have to precede him, so that he can choose himself from great abundance? Would not he have to be the last one, in order to envelop everything within himself? And what sense would our existence make, if the one we longed for had already had his existence in the past?

…Is there anything now that can rob you of the hope of someday being in him, who is the ultimate, in the infinite future, as once he was in your past?

Celebrate Christmas…with this reverent feeling that he perhaps needs exactly this, your fear of life, in order to begin. Perhaps these very days of your transition are the times that he is touched by everything with you…”

The Fifth Letter

***The first three letters were posted in "10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas" in December 2009. Unfortunately the rest of the ten letters weren't posted by then, so here's the rest of this very profound writing for your enlightenment.

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“…Rome, if one does not know the city, can be depressingly sad for the first few days…because it exudes a death-like, dreary atmosphere, typical of museums. The over-abundant relics of the past have been resurrected and their revival maintained with tremendous effort. From them a very small segment presently makes its living. All of these distorted and stale things are basically nothing more than coincidental remnants of another era and another kind of life, which is not ours and should not be considered as our own. They have been indiscriminately overrated by many…

…One says to himself: No, there is not more beauty here than else where. All these things have been restored and improved by the work of craftsmen. They have been and are admired and revered by generations past and present, and that will continue into the future. All these things mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart, no worth. Yet there is much beauty here.

There is much beauty here because there is much beauty everywhere. Unending streams of lively water flow over the old aqueducts in the large city. They dance in the city squares over white stone bowls and spread themselves out in wide roomy basins. They rustle by day and raise their voice to the night. Night here is grand, expansive, soft from the winds, and full of stars. And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues lined with trees. And staircases are here, steps conceived by Michelangelo, steps that were modeled after downward gliding waters, broad in their descent, one step giving birth to another, as wave form wave. Through such impressions one composes of the multiplicities that speak and chatter. (How talkative they are!) One gradually learns to recognize the very few things in which eternity dwells, which one con love, and solitude, of which one can softly partake…”

The Fourth Letter

***The first three letters were posted in "10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas" in December 2009. Unfortunately the rest of the ten letters weren't posted by then, so here's the rest of this very profound writing for your enlightenment.

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“…If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable…

You are so young; you stand before beginnings…have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart…love the questions themselves, like locked rooms…like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot…be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present…live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day…
…everything assigned to us is a challenge; nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters…

Man has transformed eating into something else. Lack on the one hand and excess on the other have clouded the clarity of this basic need. Similarly cloudy have become all the deep and simple human needs in which life renews itself. But the individual can clarify them for himself and can live that clarity—as long as he is not too dependent on others, as long as he has a pact with aloneness.

…The earth is full of this secret down to her smallest things. Oh, that we would only receive this secret more humbly, bear it more earnestly, endure it, and feel how awesomely difficult it is, rather than to take it lightly…

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things…

…embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant, you say. That shows it is beginning to dawn around you; there is an expanse opening about you. And when your nearness becomes distant, then you have already expanded for: to being among the stars. Your horizon has widened greatly. Rejoice in your growth. No one can join you in that…

…your pact with aloneness will be your support and solace even in the midst of unfamiliar situations. It is through that aloneness that you will find all your paths…”

10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas - The Third Letter

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

Now Niels Lyhne, a book of grandeur and great depth, will reveal itself to you little by little…There is nothing in it that would not summon a familiar resonance echoing from the memory. No experience was too insignificant—the smallest happening unfolds like destiny. Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others.

…read the wonderful book about the fate and longing of Marie Grubbe and Jacobsen’s letters…journals…fragments…poems…

…read as little as possible of aesthetic critiques. They are either prejudiced views that have become petrified and senseless in their hardened lifeless state, or they are clever word games. Their views gain approval today but not tomorrow. Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique. Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly…Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress, must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or hastened. All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth. To allow the completion of every impression…beyond words, in the realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently the hour of the descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one’s art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity.

In this there is no measuring with time. A year doesn’t matter; ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless…Patience is all!

…the creative experience lies…close to the sexual…its pain and its pleasure, that both phenomena are only different forms of the same longing and bliss. If one could say “sexuality” instead of “lust”—sexuality in a large sense…wide pure sense…—then his art would be great and infinitely important. His poetic talent is great and as strong as the primeval urge; it has an impetuous rhythm that breaks forth out of him as water out of the rocks.

…one of the most difficult tests for the true artist: he must always remain innocently unaware of this best virtues if he does not wish to rob them of their spontaneity and their unaffectedness…And when [Richard] Dehmel’s creative power…meets the sexual, then it finds the man not quite so pure as he needs to be. For him there exists no totally mature and pure world of sex, none that is simple human and not masculine only…there exist lust, intoxication, and restlessness, beleaguered with the old prejudices and pride…love. He loves only as male, not as a human being. Consequently there is in his perception something confining…spiteful…wild…temporal, not eternal…detracts from his art, and makes it suggestive and questionable…imprinted with passion and transience. Little of it will continue and endure. (But this is true of most art.)

10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas - The Second Letter

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us…to help another, a great deal must happen…different elements must coincide harmoniously; a whole constellation of things must come about for that to happen even once.

…about irony: Do not allow it to control you, especially during uncreative moments. In creative moments allow it to serve you as another means to better understand life. If you use it with pure intent, then it is pure…But beware of a viewpoint that is too consistently ironic; turn your attention to lofty and serious issues instead. In their presence irony will pale and become helpless. Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there. And you…arrive at the brink of greatness, ask yourself whether this ironic attitude springs from a truly deep need of your being. For due to the impact of serious things, it will either fall away from you, if it is something merely incidental, of if it is truly innately belongs to you, it will be strengthened to become an important tool, and take its place with all the other instruments with which you must build your own art.

Of all my books there are only a few that are indispensable to me. Two of them are constantly at my fingertips wherever I may be. They are…the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen…avail yourself of the small book Six Stories…and his novel Niels Lyhne, and begin with the first story…”Mogens”. A whole world will envelop you…learn of them…love them. For this love you shall be requited a thousand...times over, no matter what turn your life will take. This love…will weave itself through the tapestry of your evolving being as one of the most important threads of your experiences, your disappointments, and your joys.

…of the essence of creativity, the depth of it and its enduring quality, there are only two names that I can name: that of Jacobsen, the very greatest of writers, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor. No one among all artists living today compares with them.”

10 days of Rilke 'til Christmas - The First Letter

Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

“You ask whether your poems are good. You send them to publishers; you compare them with other poems; you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts…I suggest that you give all that up. You are looking outward and…that you must not do now. No one can advise and help you, no one.

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And…if you can confidently meet this...with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man...write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. Do not write love poems…at first; they present the greatest challenge. It requires great, fully ripened power to produce something personal…Beware of general themes. Cling to those that your everyday life offers you. Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful. Describe all that with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity. In order to express yourself, use things in your surroundings, the scenes of your dreams, and the subjects of your memory.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject…do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant…Attempt to resurrect these sunken sensations of a distant past. You will gain assuredness. Your aloneness will expand and will become your home, greeting you like the quiet dawn…

If, as a result of…sinking into your own world, poetry should emerge, you will not think to ask someone whether it is good…For you will hear in them your own voice; you will see in them a piece of your life, a natural possession of yours. A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

Therefore…Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its source you will find...whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analyzing…bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without. For the creative artist must be a world of his own and must find everything within himself and in nature, to which he has betrothed himself.

It is possible that…you might find that you must give up becoming a poet. Even then this process of turning inward…will not have been in vain. Your life will...find its own paths. That they will be good ones and rich and expansive…

…progress quietly and seriously in your evolvement. You could greatly interfere with that process if you look outward and expect to obtain answers...which only your innermost feeling in your quietest hour can perhaps give you.”