R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 9
But this is what young people are so often
and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient)
fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter
themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. .
. . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken
things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their
happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses
himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others
who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives
up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an
unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of
disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many
conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this
most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with
conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied
invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of
very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had
to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love
falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the
average person will of course always go on doing that - ), feel oppressed by
their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and
fruitful in their own, personal way -. For their nature tells them that the
questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be
resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are
questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case
require a new, special, wholly personal answer -. But how can they, who have
already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are
whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way
out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
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
