By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Reginald Snell
Letters to his interlocutor, Franz Xaver Kappus.
I – Paris, February 17th 1903
“In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism: the invariable result is more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people mostly would have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never tried, and more unutterable than them are all works of art whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.”
“You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and you are troubled when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (as you have permitted to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must not do.”
“Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.”
“This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must’, then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse.”
“If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.”
“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.”
“Go into yourself and explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.”
II – Viareggio near Pisa, April 5th 1903
“You must of course know that you will always give me pleasure with every letter, and be only indulgent towards the answer, which will often perhaps leave you empty-handed; for fundamentally, and precisely in the deepest and most important things, we are unspeakably alone, and a great deal must happen in order that one man may be able to advise or even help another – a great deal must succeed, a whole constellation of things must be realized for it once to prosper.”
III – Viareggio, April 23rd 1903
“Nothing is there that had not been understood, conceived, experienced and recognized in the vibrating echo of memory; no experience has been too slight, and the smallest happening unfolds like a destiny, and the destiny itself is like a wonderful broad tapestry where every thread is inwoven by an infinitely delicate hand, laid next to its fellow, and held and supported by a hundred others.” - on Niels Lyhne
“Read as few aesthetic-critical things as possible – they are either partisan opinions, become hardened and meaningless in their lifeless petrifaction, or else they are a skilful play upon words, in which one view is uppermost today and its opposite tomorrow. Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism.”
“Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth. To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that is alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation.”
“To be an artist means not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms if Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far.”
IV – Worpswede near Bremen, July 16th 1903
“If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can do unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wakefulness and knowing.”
“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. ”
“Sex is difficult; yes. But it is the difficult that is enjoined upon us, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only recognize that and contrive, yourself, out of your own disposition and nature, out of your experience and childhood and strength to achieve an entirely individual relationship to sex (not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer fear to lose yourself and become unworthy of your best possession.”
“Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights.”
“And perhaps the sexes are more akin than we suppose, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maiden, freed from all false feelings and perversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will unite as human beings to bear in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.”
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and bear the pain which it has caused you with fair-sounding lament. For those that are near you are far, you say, and this shows that distance begins to grow round you. And when your nearness is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very great; be glad of your growing, into which you can take no one else with you, and be good to those that remain behind, and be self-possessed and quiet with them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not comprehend. Seek some unpretending and honest communion with them, which you are under no necessity to alter when you yourself become more and more different; love life in a strange guise in them, and make allowance for those ageing people who fear the solitude in which you trust.”
“It is good that you are entering first of all upon a profession which makes you independent and places you on your own in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels constrained by the form of this profession.”
V – Rome, October 29th 1903
“Finally after weeks of daily resistance you find your bearings again, although still a little bewildered, and you reflect: no, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects which have been continuously admired for generations, which workmen’s hand have mended and restored, signify nothing, are nothing and have no heart and no worth – but there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.”
“Through impressions like these you come to yourself, win your way back from the pretentious manifold which talks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and you learn slowly to recognize the very few things in which something eternal endures that you can love, and something solitary in which you can gently share.”
VI – Rome, December 23rd 1903
“There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring. But that must not mislead you. What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end – that is what you must be able to attain.”
“To be alone, as you were alone in childhood, when the grown-ups were going about, involved with things which seemed important and great, because the great ones looked so busy and because you grasped nothing of their business.
And when one day you perceive that their pursuits are paltry, their professions torpid and no longer connected with life, why not proceed like a child to look upon them as something alien, from out of the depth of your own world, out of the spaciousness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and profession? Why want to exchange a child’s wise non-understanding for defensiveness and disdain, when surely non-understanding is aloneness, but defensiveness and disdain are participation in what you want by these means to avoid.”
“I know your profession is hard and filled with contradiction of yourself, and I anticipated your lament and knee that it would come. Now it has come I cannot appease it, I can only advise you to consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of hostility against the individual, saturated so to say with the hatred of those have reconciled themselves mutely and morosely to their own insipid duty.”
“As bees collect honey, so we take what is sweetest out of everything and build Him. We start actually with the slight, with the unpretentious (if only it is done with love), with work and with resting after it, with a silence or with a little solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without helpers or adherents, we begin him whom we shall not experience any more than our forefathers could experience us. And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.
Is there anything which can take from you the hope of thus being hereafter in him, in the most distant, the uttermost?”
VII – Rome, May 14th 1904
“People have (with the help of convention) found the solution of everything in ease and the easiest side of ease; but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult; everything living holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself according to its own character and is an individual in its own right, strived to be so at any cost and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary; for solitude is difficult; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.”
“To love is also good: for love is difficult. Fondness between human beings: that is perhaps the most difficult task that is set us, the ultimate thing, the final trial and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation.”
“Young people, who are beginners on everything cannot know love yet: they have to learn it.”
“Loving in the first instance is nothing that can be called losing, surrendering and uniting oneself to another (for what would a union be, of something unclarified and unready, still inferior–?), It is a sublime occasion for the individual to mature, to grow into something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and summons him to a distant goal.”
“But that is where young people so often and so grievously go wrong: that they (whose nature it is to have no patience) throw themselves at eachother when love comes over them, scatter themselves abroad, just as they are in all their untidiness, disorder, and confusion…”
“No region of human experience is so well supplied with conventions as this; life-belts of the most varied invention, boats and swimming-bladders are there; social perception has contrived to create shelters of every description, for as it was disposed to take love-life as a pleasure, it had to mould it into something easy, cheap, innocuous and safe, as public pleasures are.”
“One day the girl will be here and the woman whose name will no longer signify merely the opposite of masculinity, but something in itself, something which makes us think of no complement or limitation, but of only life and existence – the feminine human being.”
“This step forward will (very much against the wishes of outstripped man to begin with) change the love experience that now is full of error, alter it fundamentally, refashion it into a relationship meant to be between one human being and another, no longer between man and wife. And this more human love (which will consummate itself infinitely thoughtfully and gently, and well and clearly in binding and loosing) will be something like that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love which consists in the mutual guarding, bordering and saluting of two solitudes.”
VIII – Borgeby gård, Flädie, Sweden, August 12th 1904
“I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension which we experience as paralysis, because we no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because for a moment everything familiar and customary has been taken from us; because we stand in the middle of a crossing where we cannot remain standing. Therefore it is, also, that the sorrow passes by us: the new thing in us, that has been added to us, has entered into our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber, and is no more even there,– is already in the blood. And we do not realize what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing had happened, and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed into which a guest had entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but there are many indications to suggest that the future is entering into us in this manner in order to transform itself within us before it happens. And therefore it is so important to be solitary and heedful when we are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and inflexible moment when our future sets foot in us stands so much nearer to life than that other noise and fortuitous instant when it happens to us as if from without. The more patient, quiet and open we are in our sorrowing, the more deeply and the more unhesitatingly will be the new thing enter us, the better shall we deserve it, the more will it be our own destiny, and when one day later it “happens” (that is, goes forth from us to others) we shall feel in our inmost selves that we are akin and close to it.”
“It becomes increasingly clear that this is fundamentally not something that we can choose or reject. We are solitary.”
“We have no cause to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors they are our terrors; if it has abysses those abysses belong to us, if dangers are there we must strive to love them. And if only we regulate our life according to that principle which advises us always to hold to the difficult, what even now appears most alien to us will become most familiar and loyal. How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at bottom the helplessness that seeks our help.”
“Why do you want to exclude any disturbance, any pain, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what these conditions are working upon you?”
“Do not think that the man who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words which sometimes do you good. His life has much hardship and sadness and lags far behind you. If it were otherwise, he could never have found those words.”
IX – Furuborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4th 1904
“It is perhaps no use now to reply to your actual words; for what I could say about your disposition to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner life into harmony, or about anything else that oppresses you–: it is always what I have said before: always the wish that you might be able to find patience enough in yourself to endure, and single-heartedness enough to believe; that you might win increasing trust in what is difficult , and in your solitude among other people. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, at all events.”
“All feelings are pure which gather you and lift you up; a feeling is impure which takes hold of only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you could think in the light of your childhood is good. Everything which makes more of you than you have previously been in your best hours, is right. Every exaltation is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication or turbidness, but joy into whose depths you can see.”
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become aware, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will perhaps find it helpless and nonplussed, perhaps also aggressive. But do not give way, demand arguments and conduct yourself yourself thus carefully and consistently every single time, and the day will dawn when it will become, instead of a subverter, one of your best workmen,– perhaps the cleverest of all who are building at your life.”
X – Paris, December 26th 1908
“The stillness must be immense in which such sounds and movements have room, and when one considers that to all these is added at the same time the resounding presence of the distant sea, perhaps as the innermost voice in the prehistoric harmony, one can only wish for you that you may confidently and patiently let that sublime solitude work upon you, which can no more be expunged from your life; which will work continuously and with gentle decision as an anonymous influence in everything that lies before you, somewhat as ancestral blood moves incessantly within us and mingles with our own to form that unique and unrepeatable compound that we are at every turning of our life.”
“Art too is only a way of living, and one can prepare for it, living somehow, without knowing it; in everything real one is a closer, nearer neighbour to it than in the unreal semi-artistic professions which, while they make show of a relatedness to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does, and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what calls itself and likes to be called literature.”