| while i was waiting for class today, i came across a series of boards
in the vcd/id section of the art building. it was a visual
exhibition of letters that rainer maria rilke wrote
to an aspiring poet. the message was so eloquently written that i
thought i should share it with everyone. it's really long, but it
is definitely worth the time to read.
Letter
Eight
Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden
August 12, 1904
I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus,
although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I
can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large
ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult
and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large
sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things
inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your
being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The
only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we
carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like
diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just
withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more
terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived,
rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for
us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond
the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses
with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments
when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow
mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence
arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst
of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of
tension,
which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished
emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that
has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a
moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a
transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness
passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added,
has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no
longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know
what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened,
and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.
We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs
indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be
transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so
important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the
seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into
us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point
of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are,
the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and
serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our
own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens"
(that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related
and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is
necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by
little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been
our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion;
and they ill also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does
not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only
because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates
while they were living in them that they have not realized what was
emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized
what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their
confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very
moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before
found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time
had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about
the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr.
Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
How could it not be difficult for us?
And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer
that
fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We
are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were
not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we
are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of
course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are
taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything
far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost
without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great
mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled
insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate
him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out
into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his
brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the
situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures,
change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur
suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual
fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all
that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We
must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even
the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the
only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the
strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet
us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done
infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions,"
the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so
closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so
entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have
been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the
fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the
individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human
being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed
of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank,
where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human
relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable
monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable
experience, which we don't think we can deal with. but only someone who
is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the
most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person
as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
for if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller
room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of
their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they
keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.
And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives
those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their
horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of
their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have
been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset
us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with,
and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come
to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a
fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything
around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world,
for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if
it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we
must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance
with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the
difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become
our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those
ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about
dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses?
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only
waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps
everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something
helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness
rises in
front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like
light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you
do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has
not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you
fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any
misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these
conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself
with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is
going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of
transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there
is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that
sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is
alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole
sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets
better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be
patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is
recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the
doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are
many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what
you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than
anything else.
Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw
conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise
it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at
your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets
you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are
operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The
extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so
difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the
same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a
vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so
careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a
life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which
was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been
absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems
to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the
"great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right
about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something
there which you could replace that deception with, something true and
real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral
reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of
your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many
good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood
toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond
the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease
to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is
this:
Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives
untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you
much pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far
behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to
find those words.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
thank you all for your support!! 
