R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 12
And about feelings: All feelings that concentrate you and
lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of
your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your
childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been,
even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in
your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can
see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?
And your doubt can become a good quality if
you train it. It must become knowing, 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 find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps
also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way,
attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when instead
of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers - perhaps the most
intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
...
Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can,
without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more
its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they
pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art
- as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three
quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.
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
