Letters to a Young Poet
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Language:
π Notes and Highlights
π
You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.
For this reason, flee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life
Works of art are infinitely solitary and
trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights.
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count;
And that we receive this pleasure cannot be a bad thing; what is bad is the way almost all of us misuse the experience and waste it and
apply it as a stimulus to the tired parts of our lives, as a distraction instead of as a concentration of ourselves into climactic points
Oh if only mankind could embrace this mystery, which penetrates the earth right into its smallest elements
and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand.
Look for some kind of simple and loyal way of being together with them which does not necessarily have to alter however much you may change
People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and
It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
so too we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate originates in ourselves, in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside.
The future is fixed, dear Mr Kappus, but we move around in infinite space.
We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it.
That, when you come down to it, is the only kind of courage that is demanded of us: the courage for the oddest, the most unexpected, the most inexplicable things that we may encounter.
We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to
Perhaps everything terrifying i
deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you donβt know what work it
is these states are performing within you?
Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading?
But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.
Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you.
do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.
And otherwise let life take its course. Believe me: life i