R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 2
If you trust in Nature, in the small Things
that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if
you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who
serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become
easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your
conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost
awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. (...) Don't search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far
in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and
forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for
that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of
your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself,
and don't hate anything. Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been
entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and
everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself,
out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and
strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not
influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid
of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
...
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
