R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 10
They act out of mutual helplessness, and
then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the conventions that is
approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some
less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything
around them is - convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused,
muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such
confusion leads to has its own convention, however unusual (i.e., in the
ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step,
an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously will find that
neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any
clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both
these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not
general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in
which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet
us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work
of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners,
are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us
as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and
frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of
their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible
to those who come long after us. That would be much.
(...) And one more thing: Don't think that the great love
which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you
know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and
purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains
strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and
the first inner work that you did on your life.
...
Rilke wrote his first letter to a young poet (the original
title is "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter") in the February
of 1903 and the last one in the December of 1908. He had already
written the "Book of Images". Read
more... Cf. Plato, Books
can be your worst enemies *
Jaspers, Truth is in
communication *
Kierkegaard, My work as an author
*
Emerson, Reading and writing as
self-knowledge *
Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as
moral activities *
Tom Schulman, Dead Poets
Society
*
Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face
*
J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
*
Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous
man
