R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 7
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of
all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long
as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes
afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we
do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live
to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed
away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as
murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
Is there anything that can deprive you of
the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest,
the outermost limit?
...
Most people have (with the help of
conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest
side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult;
everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any
way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and
against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is
difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary,
for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason
for us to do it.
...
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
