Franz Xaver Kappus (17 May 1883 – 9 October 1966) was an Austrian military officer, journalist, editor and writer who wrote poetry, short-stories, novels and screenplays. Kappus is known chiefly as the military academy cadet who wrote to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) for advice in a series of letters from 1902 to 1908 that were assembled and published in the best-selling book Letters to a Young Poet (1929).
Biography
Franz Xaver Kappus was born on 17 May 1883 in Timișoara (also known as German: Temeschwar, Temeschburg orTemeswar, in Hungarian: Temesvár), in the Banat province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[1] The Banat region (now divided between Hungary, Serbia and Romania) was populated with a large population of ethnic Germans known as Banat Swabians or Danube Swabians of which Kappus' ancestry is derived. As a 19-year old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke after learning that as a young man, Rilke, the son of an Austrian army officer, had studied at the academy's lower school at Sankt Pölten in the 1890s. Kappus corresponded with Rilke, then a popular poet at the beginning of his career, in a series of letters from 1902 to 1908, in which he sought Rilke's advice regarding the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[2][3]
Aside from his role in writing to Rilke and later publishing these letters, Kappus is largely forgotten by history. Despite the hesitancy he expressed in his letters to Rilke about pursuing a military career, he continued his military studies and served for 15 years as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[1] During the course of his life, he worked as an newspaper editor and journalist, writing poems, humorous sketches, short-stories, novels, and adapted several works (including his own) into screenplays for films in the 1930s.[1] However, Kappus did not achieve lasting fame.[1] After World War I, he was the editor of several newspapers, including Kappus Deutsche Wacht (trans. "Kappus' German Watch"), later known as Banater Tagblatt (trans. "Banat Daily"), and other newspapers Temeswarer Zeitung (trans. "Timisoara Newspaper"), and theSwabische Volkspresse (trans. "Swabian People's Press").[1] After World War II, he founded the Freie Demokratische Partei (trans. "Free Democratic Party") affiliated with ideology of classical liberalism in Berlin.[1]
Kappus died on 9 October 1966 in Berlin, Germany at the age of 82.
The first English translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, published in 1934. Kappus had compiled ten letters he received from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke between 1902 and 1908 and published them in Germany in 1929.
The first English translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, published in 1934. Kappus had compiled ten letters he received from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke between 1902 and 1908 and published them in Germany in 1929.
1.
|
Paris
February 17, 1903
Dear Sir,
Your letter arrived just
a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed
in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at
criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as
words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate
misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would
usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a
space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other
things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures
beside our own small, transitory life.
With this note as a
preface, may I just tell you that your verses have no style of their own,
although they do have silent and hidden beginnings of something personal. I
feel this most clearly in the last poem, "My Soul." There, some
thing of your own is trying to become word and melody. And in the lovely poem
"To Leopardi" a kind of kinship with that great, solitary figure
does perhaps appear. Nevertheless, the poems are not yet anything in
themselves, not yet any thing independent, even the last one and the one to
Leopardi. Your kind letter, which accompanied them managed to make clear to
me various faults that I felt in reading your verses, though I am not able to
name them specifically.
You ask whether your
verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send
them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when
certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my
advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside,
and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help
you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find
out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its
roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you
would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask
yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into
yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you
meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then
build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into
its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to
this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried
before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love
poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the
hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create
something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in
abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what
your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the
thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty
Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you
express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and
the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame
it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to
call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no
poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose
walls let in none of the world's sound - wouldn't you still have your
childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn
your attention to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous
past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and
become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other
people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of , this turning within,
out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think
of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest
magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural
possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if
it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So,
dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see
how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find
the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer,
just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will
discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon
yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what
reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself
and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is
devoted.
But after this descent
into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce
becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without
writing, then one shouldn't write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self
searching that I ask of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will
still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and
wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
What else can I tell
you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I
want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and
earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more
violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to
questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can
perhaps answer.
It was a pleasure for me
to find in your letter the name of Professor Horacek; I have great reverence
for that kind, learned man, and a gratitude that has lasted through the
years. Will you please tell him how I feel; it is very good of him to still
think of me, and I appreciate it.
The poem that you
entrusted me with, I am sending back to you. And I thank you once more for
your questions and sincere trust, of which, by answering as honestly as I
can, I have tried to make myself a little worthier than I, as a stranger,
really am.
Yours very truly,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
2.
|
Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy)
April 5, 1903
You must pardon me, dear Sir, for waiting until
today to gratefully remember your letter of February 24. I have been unwell
all this time, not really sick, but oppressed by an influenza-like debility,
which has made me incapable of doing anything. And finally, since it just
didn't want to improve I came to this southern sea, whose beneficence helped
me once before. But I am still not well, writing is difficult, and so you
must accept these few lines instead of the letter I would have liked to send.
Of course, you must know
that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and you must be
indulgent with the answer, which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed;
for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we
are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go
right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being
to successfully advise or help another.
Today I would like to
tell you just two more things:
Irony: Don't let
yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you
are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of fife. Used
purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel
yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing
familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it
becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony
never descends and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether
this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For
under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if
it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to
you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among
the instruments which you can form your art with.
And the second thing I
want to tell you today is this:
Of all my books, I find
only a few indispensable, and two of them are always with me, wherever I am.
They are here, by my side: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish poet
Jens Peter Jacobsen. Do you know his works? It is easy to find them, since
some have been published in Recalm's Universal Library, in a very good translation.
Get the little volume of Six Stories by J. P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels
Lyhne, and begin with the first story in the for mer, which is cared
"Mogens." A whole world will envelop you, the happiness, the
abundance, .the inconceivable vastness of a world. Live for a while in these
books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of &U
love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of
times, whatever your life may become - it will, I am sure, go through the whole
fabric of your being, as one of the most important threads among all the
threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.
If I were to say who has
given me the greatest experience of the essence of creativity, its depths and
eternity, there are just two names would mention: Jacobsen, that great, great
poet, and Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who is without peer among all artists
who are alive today.
And all success upon
your path!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
3.
|
Viareggio,
near Pisa (Italy)
April 23,
1903
You gave me much
pleasure, dear Sir, with your Easter letter; for it brought much good news of
you, and the way you spoke about Jacobsen's great and beloved art showed me
that I was not wrong to guide your fife and its many questions to this
abundance.
Now Niels Lyhne will
open to you, a book of splendors and depths; the more often one reads it, the
more everything seems to be contained within it, from life's most
imperceptible fragrances to the full, enormous taste of its heaviest fruits.
In it there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held,
lived, and known in memory's wavering echo; no experience has been too
unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is
like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an
infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and
supported by a hundred others. You will experience the great happiness of
reading this book for the first time, and will move through its numberless
surprises as if you were in a new dream. But I can tell you that even later
on one moves through these books, again and again, with the same astonishment
and that they lose none of their wonderful power and relinquish none of the
overwhelming enchantment that they had the first time one read them.
One just comes to enjoy
them more and more, becomes more and more grateful, and somehow better and
simpler in one's vision, deeper in one's faith in life, happier and greater
in the way one lives.
And later on, you will
have to read the wonderful book of the fate and yearning of Marie Grubbe, and
Jacobsen's letters and journals and fragments, and finally his verses which
(even if they are just moderately well translated) live in infinite sound.
(For this reason I would advise you to buy, when you can, the lovely Complete
Edition of Jacobsen's works, which contains all of these. It is in three
volumes, well translated, published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig, and
costs, I think, only five or six marks per volume.)
In your opinion of
"Roses should have been here . . ." (that work of such incomparable
delicacy and form) you are of course quite, quite incontestably right, as
against the man who wrote the introduction. But let me make this request
right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism. Such things are
either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless,
hardened and empty of life, or else they are clever word-games, in which one
view wins , and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite
solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can
touch and hold them and be fair to them. Always trust yourself and your own
feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that
sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your
inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments
their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must
come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is
gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a
feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the
unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and
with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is
born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as
in creating.
In this there is no
measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being
an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which
doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not
afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to
those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so
unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with
pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Richard Dehmel: My experience
with his books (and also, incidentally, with the man, whom I know slightly)
is that whenever I have discovered one of his beautiful pages, I am. always
afraid that the next one will destroy the whole effect and change what is
admirable into something unworthy. You have characterized him quite well with
the phrase: "living and writing in heat." And in fact the artist's
experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its
pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and
the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say
"sex";- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin
attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and
infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal
instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him
like a volcano.
But this power does not
always seem completely straightforward and without pose. (But that is one of
the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious,
unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor
and innocence!) And then, when, thundering through his being, it arrives at
the sexual, it finds someone who is not so pure as it needs him to be.
Instead of a completely ripe and pure world of sexuality, it finds a. world
that is not human enough, that is only male, is heat, thunder, and
restlessness, and burdened with the old prejudice and arrogance with which
the male has always disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves only as a
male, and not as a human being, there is something narrow in his sexual
feeling, something that seems wild, malicious, time-bound, uneternal, which
diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate,
it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will endure. (But most
art is like that!) Even so, one can deeply enjoy what is great in it, only
one must not get lost in it and become a hanger-on of Dehmel's world, which
is so infinitely afraid, filled with adultery and confusion, and is far from
the real fates, which make one suffer more than these time-bound afflictions
do, but also give one more opportunity for greatness and more courage for
eternity.
Finally, as to my own
books, I wish I could send you any of them that might give you pleasure. But
I am very poor, and my books, as soon as they are published, no longer belong
to me. I can’t even afford them myself and, as I would so often like to, give
them to those who would be kind to them.
So I am writing for you,
on another slip of paper, the titles (and publishers) of my most recent books
(the newest ones - all together I published perhaps 12 or 13), and must leave
to you, dear Sir, to order one or two of them when you can.
I am glad that my books
will be in your hands.
With best wishes,
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke.
|
4.
|
Worpswede,
near Bremen
July 16, 1903
About ten days ago I
left Paris, tired and quite sick, and traveled to this great northern plain,
whose vastness and silence and sky ought to make me well again. But I arrived
during a long period of rain; this is the first day it has begun to let up over
the restlessly blowing landscape, and I am taking advantage of this moment of
brightness to greet you, dear Sir.
My dear Mr. Kappus: I
have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had
forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one
finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very
near. It is your letter of May second, and I am sure you remember it. As I
read it now, in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your
beautiful anxiety about life, even more than when I was in Paris, where
everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise
that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous
landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I
feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and
feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most
articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very
delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to
remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my
eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple 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. You
are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear
Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your
heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked
rooms or books written in a very foreign language. 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.
Bodily delight is a
sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling
with , which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite
learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the
splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad;
what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and
apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a
distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest
moments. People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the
one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all
the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddy.
But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not
the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man). He can remember that
all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and
yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and
willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure,
not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure
and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings
could more humbly receive this mystery which the world is filled with, even
in its smallest Things, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how
terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be
more reverent to ward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one,
whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too
arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer,
more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight. "The
thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping" is nothing
without its continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world,
nothing without the thousand-fold assent from Things and animals - and our
enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is
full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In
one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again
and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the
nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather
sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will
appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable. And they call forth the
future; and even if they have made a mistake and embrace blindly, the future
comes anyway, a new human being arises, and on the foundation of the accident
that seems to be accomplished here, there awakens the law by which a strong,
determined seed forces its way through to the egg cell that openly advances
to meet it. Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes
law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many)
lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter,
without knowing it. And don't be puzzled by how many names there are and how
complex each life seems. Perhaps above them all there is a great motherhood,
in the form of a communal yearning. The beauty of the girl, a being who (as
you so beautifully say) "has not yet achieved anything," is
motherhood that has a presentiment of itself and begins to prepare, becomes
anxious, yearns. And the mother's beauty is motherhood that serves, and in
the old woman there is a great remembering. And in the man too there is
motherhood, it seems to me, physical and mental; his engendering is also a
kind of birthing, and it is birthing when he creates out of his innermost
fullness. And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the
great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man
and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each
other not a opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite
as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and
patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.
But everything that may
someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already,
prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore,
dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.
For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the
space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far
away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be
happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you,
and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of
them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with
your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some
simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't
necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you
see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward
those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Avoid providing material for the drama, that is always stretched tight
between parent and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and
wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't
comprehend Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any
understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an
inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a
blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to
step outside it.
It is good that you will
soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you
completely on your own, in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your
innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself
consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with
enormous conventions and leaves very little room for a personal
interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a support and a home
for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you
will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and
my faith is with you.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke.
5.
|
|
Rome
October 29, 1903
Dear Sir,
I received your letter
of August 29 in Florence, and it has taken me this long two months to answer.
Please forgive this tardiness, but I don't like to write letters while I am
traveling because for letter-writing I need more than the most necessary tools:
some silence and solitude and a not too unfamiliar hour.
We arrived in Rome about
six weeks ago, at a time when it was still the empty, the hot, the
notoriously feverish Rome, and this circumstance, along with other practical
difficulties in finding a place to live, helped make the restlessness around
us seem as if it would never end, and the unfamiliarity lay upon us with the
weight of homelessness. In addition, Rome (if one has not yet become
acquainted with it) makes one feel stifled with sadness for the first few
days: through the gloomy and lifeless museum atmosphere that it exhales,
through the abundance of its pasts, which are brought forth and laboriously
held up (pasts on which a tiny present subsists), through the terrible
overvaluing, sustained by scholars and philologists and imitated by the
ordinary tourist in Italy, of all these disfigured and decaying Things,
which, after all, are essentially nothing more than accidental remains from
another time and from a life that is not and should not be ours. Finally,
after weeks of daily resistance, one finds oneself somewhat composed again,
even though still a bit confused, and one says to oneself: No, there is not
more beauty here than in other places, and all these objects, which have been
marveled at by generation after generation, mended and restored by the hands
of workmen, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; but
there is much beauty here, because every where there is much beauty. Waters
infinitely full of life move along the ancient aqueducts into the great city
and dance in the many city squares over white basins of stone and spread out
in large, spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up their murmuring to the
night, which is vast here and starry and soft with winds. And there are
gardens here, unforgettable boulevards, and stair cases designed by
Michelangelo, staircases constructed on the pattern of downward-gliding
waters and, as they descend, widely giving birth to step out of step as if it
were wave out of wave. Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins
oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there
(and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few
Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something
solitary that one can gently take part in.
I am still living in the
city, on the Capitol, not far from the most beautiful equestrian statue that
has come down to us from Roman art - the statue of Marcus Aurelius; but in a
few weeks I will move into a quiet, simple room, an old summerhouse, which
lies lost deep in a large park, hidden from the city, from its noises and
incidents. There I will live all winter and enjoy the great silence, from
which I expect the gift of happy, work-filled hours....
From there, where I will
be more at home, I will write you a longer letter, in which I win say
something more about what you wrote me. Today I just need to tell you (and
perhaps I am wrong not to have done this sooner) that the book you sent me
(you said in your letter that it contained some works of yours) hasn't
arrived. Was it sent back to you, perhaps from Worpswede? (They will not
forward packages to foreign countries.) This is the most hopeful possibility,
and I would be glad to have it confirmed. I do hope that the package hasn't
been lost - unfortunately, the Italian mail service being what it is, that
would not be anything unusual.
I would have been glad
to have this book (as I am to have anything that comes from you); and any
poems that have arisen in the meantime I will always (if you entrust them to
me) read and read again and experience as well and as sincerely as I can.
With greetings and good wishes,
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
6.
|
Rome
December 23, 1903
My dear Mr. Kappus,
I don't want you to be
without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of
the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you
notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself)
would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is
vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would
gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for
the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most
unworthy. But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows;
for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of
spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only
this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one
for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you
were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with
matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and
because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.
And when you realize
that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no
longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a
child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the
depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is
itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's
wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not
understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and
scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to
separate yourself from.
Think, dear Sir, of the
world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to:
a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own
- only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above
everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self
is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and
not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward
people. Who says that you have any attitude at all? l know, your profession
is hard and full of things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and
knew that it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to
reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that,
filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated
as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an
insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened
with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations,
and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is
nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the
important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the
individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and
when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled
evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from
him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life. What
you, dear Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer, you would have
felt in just the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even
if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and
independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not
have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for
anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try
to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still
there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands;
everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening,
which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a
child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood,
you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups
are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
And if it frightens and
torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that
accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it
everywhere, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost
God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For
when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom
grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do
you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little
stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by
him? But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not
exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and
Muhammad deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that even
now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him -
what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who
has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost?
Why don't you think of
him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the
one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we
are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming
into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the
history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is
again and again a beginning, and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in
itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must
not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of
fullness and superabundance? Must he not be the last one, so that he can
include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we
are longing for has already existed?
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?
Dear Mr. Kappus,
celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very
anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are
perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked
at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness,
and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more
difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.
And be glad and
confident.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
7.
|
Rome
May 14, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed
since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first
it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that
again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to
you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the
beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear
here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you
(which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your
letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied
out your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the
shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours
that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know
that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's
own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it
before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your
own.
It was a pleasure for me
to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.
And you should not let
yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in
you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and
prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a
great distance. 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.
It is also good to love:
because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being:
that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the
ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is
merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in
everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.
With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their
solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But
learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a
long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened
kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean
merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a
union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still
incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become
something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the
sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that
chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task
of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and
night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging
and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still,
for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is
perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
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 life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and
water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every 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?
They act out of mutual
helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape
the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall
into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional
solution. For then everything around them is convention. Wherever people act
out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional:
every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, how ever
unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating
would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without
strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously
will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love
has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and
for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand, on without opening,
there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same
measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things
will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that
the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life,
and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure
and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing
ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have
hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance
and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us.
That would be much.
We are only just now
beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual
objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such
relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has
brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman,
in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male
behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the
uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going
through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises
just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the
deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells
more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have
become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is
not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit
and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This
humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and
humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of
mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men
who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and
even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs
are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women
whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something
in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit,
but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This advance (at first
very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love
experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground
up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human
being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more
human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and
gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble
what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that
consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
And one more thing:
Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were
a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes
didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living
today? I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory
because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you
did on your life. - All good wishes to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
8.
|
Borgeby
gard, Fladie, Sweden
August 12, 1904
I want to talk to you
again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I
can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have
had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this
passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether
these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many
things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep
inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we
carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like
diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and
after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather
inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that
we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our
knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment,
perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our
joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something
unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us
withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows,
stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that
almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis
because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are
alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we
trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in
the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the
sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added,
has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer
even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We
could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have
changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has
come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future
enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it
happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when
one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our
future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and
accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The
quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more
deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make
it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it
"happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will
feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary.
It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by
little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our
own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they
will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into
us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people
have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them
that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to
them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered
them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had
never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long
time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about
the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but
we move in infinite space.
How could it not be
difficult for us?
And to speak of solitude
again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that
one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves
about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better
it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this
realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes
used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us,
and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and,
almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great
mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an
abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he
was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into
a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in
order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how
all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many
of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop,
unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond
all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We
must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the
unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind
of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most
unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people
have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the
experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called "spirit
world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have
through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the
senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To
say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only
impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the
relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been
lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow
place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that
causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such
unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new,
inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only
someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even
the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as
something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we
imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is
obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot
near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the
dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel
out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the
unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps
or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten
or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord
with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come
to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate
mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no
reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If
it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong
to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange
our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always
trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become
our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient
myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that
at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons
in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once,
with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its
deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn't be
frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than
any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves
over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something
is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in
its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life
any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know
what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute
yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is
going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions
and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything
unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by
which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it
to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that
is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now;
you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who
is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor,
who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when
the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are
your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.
Don't observe yourself
too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you;
simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with
blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in
everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of
your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn.
The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so
difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same
time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters
it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names
anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not
the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite
necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble.
And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you
overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you
have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is
that there was already something there which you could replace that deception
with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been
just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has be come a
part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many
good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward
the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the
great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be
difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
And if there is one more
thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is
trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words
that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and
remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able
to find those words.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
9.
|
Furuborg,
Jonsered, in Sweden
November 4, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
During this time that
has passed without a letter, I have been partly traveling, partly so busy
that I couldn't write. And even today writing is difficult for me, because I
have already had to write so many letters that my hand is tired. If I could
dictate, I would have much more to say to you, but as it is, please accept
these few words as an answer to your long letter.
I think of you often,
dear Mr. Kappus, and with such concentrated good wishes that somehow they
ought to help you. Whether my letters really are a help, I often doubt. Don't
say, "Yes, they are." Just accept them calmly and without many
thanks, and let us wait for what wants to come.
There is probably no
point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your
tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives
into harmony or about all the other things that oppress you-: is just what I
have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough
patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain
more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among
other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life
is in the right, always.
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.
That is all, dear Mr.
Kappus, that I am able to tell you today. But I am sending you, along with
this letter, the reprint of a small poem that has just appeared in the Prague
German Labor. In it I speak to you further of life and death and of how both
are great and glorious.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
|
10.
|
Paris
the day after Christmas, 1908
You must know, dear Mr.
Kappus, how glad I was to have the lovely letter from you. The news that you
give me, real and expressible as it now is again, seems to me good news, and
the longer I thought it over, the more I felt that it was very good news indeed.
That is really what I wanted to write you for Christmas Eve; but I have been
variously and uninterruptedly living in my work this winter, and the ancient
holiday arrived so quickly that I hardly had enough time to do the most
necessary errands, much less to write.
But I have thought of
you often during this holiday and imagined how silent you must be in your
solitary fort among the empty hills, upon which those large southern winds
fling themselves as if they wanted to devour them in large pieces.
It must be immense, this
silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that
along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as
the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that
you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon
you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in
everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act an
anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of
our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the
unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.
Yes: I am glad you have
that firm, sayable existence with you, that title, that uniform, that
service, all that tangible and limited world, which in such surroundings,
with such an isolated and not numerous body of men, takes on seriousness and
necessity, and implies a vigilant application, above and beyond the frivolity
and mere time passing of the military profession, and not only permits a
self-reliant attentiveness but actually cultivates it. And to be in
circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in
front of great natural Things - that is all we need.
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. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome
the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and
courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality. May the coming year support and
strengthen you in that.
Always
Yours,
R. M. Rilke
|
No comments:
Post a Comment