In the ever brilliant and enlivening `Letters to a Young Poet`, Rilke offers sage advice for a brave and expansive approach to life. The letters were intended for a poet-protege, and offer wise words of practical application to anyone who wishes to live and create fully, whilst not becoming overly encumbered by the unavoidable hardships of being courageously human. The letters remind us that there is no experience truly worth bemoaning, or lacking in value ––especially when it comes to the reflective process of making good art:
On Trust:
“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.”
Embracing challenges and living the question:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Welcoming solitude:
“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it."
“The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.”
Having patients:
“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... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”
Egon Schiele - Alte Häuser in Krumau - 1914
Courage:
“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”
The light that is to be found in darkness:
``You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad?``
```Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.``
How sadness changes and expands who we think we are:
``For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, — is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.``
LATIFA ECHAKHCH, La dépossession, 2014
Advice from Joanna Macy, one of our most treasured translators of Rilke's poetry: "...you're always asked to sort of stretch a little bit more, but actually we're made for that. There's a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it's a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn't destroy its world. But in any case, there's absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it's going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you're alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time."
And here she reads his poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" from `The Book of Hours`:
Lines I always come back to:
"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me."
A timeless reminder that nothing we encounter is without recourse or beauty.
Natasha.x
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