BY RAINER MARIA RILKE AND SNELL REGINALD
- Below you can find my top highlights from the book (it is not meant to be a summary)
- Quotes are edited for readability when context is required, and bolded to help structure the notes.
- Skim… then pause on the bold paragraphs that catch your interest. Reflection requires pause.
- If it resonates, you can purchase the full book here.
Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.
You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.
From this turning inwards, from this sinking into your private world, there come verses, you will not think to ask anyone whether they are good verses. You will not attempt, either, to interest journals in these works: for you will see in them your own dear genuine possession, a portion and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other.
Go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds, without enquiring too closely into every word. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. … For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.
On deciding to become a “poet”: Perhaps however, after this descent into yourself and into your aloneness, you will have to renounce your claim to become a poet; (it is sufficient, as I have said, to feel that one could live without writing, in order not to venture it at all.) But even then this introversion which I beg of you has not been in vain. Your life will at all events find thenceforward its individual paths; and that they may be good and rich and far reaching I wish for you more than I can say.
Grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.
On doing what you can, not less, not more: I am not yet well, I find writing difficult, and so you must take these few lines in lieu of more.
Book recommendations: Get hold of the little volume called Six Tales by J. P. Jacobsen, and his novel Niels Lyhne,and start with the first story in the former book, which is called Mogens. One only enjoys them ever increasingly, becomes more grateful and somehow better and simpler in one’s gazing, deeper in one’s believing of life, and in life greater and more blessed.—
Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.—
Decide each time according to yourself and your feelings in the face of every such declaration, discussion or introduction; if you should still be wrong, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other perceptions. Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth. To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that is alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation.
There is no measuring by time there, a year there has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far. I am learning it daily, learning it through pains to which I am grateful: patience is all!
Artistic experience really lies so incredibly close to sexual, to its agony and its ecstasy, that both phenomena are actually only different forms of one and the same longing and felicity.
That is just one of the most difficult tests with a creator: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he does not want to deprive them of their unselfconsciousness and integrity!)
Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious. It is not without blemish, it bears the imprint of time and of passion, and little of it will endure and persist. (But most art is like that!)
Reverent towards his fertility, which is all one whether it be intellectual or physical … bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing.
There I shall live the whole winter and rejoice in the great stillness, from which I expect the gift of good and effective hours.
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end,—that is what you must be able to attain. To be alone, as you were alone in childhood, when the grown-ups were going about, involved with things which seemed important and great, because the great ones looked so busy and because you grasped nothing of their business.
And when one day you perceive that their pursuits are paltry, their professions torpid and no longer connected with life, why not proceed like a child to look upon them as something alien, from out of the depth of your own world, out of the spaciousness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and profession? Why want to exchange a child’s wise non-understanding for defensiveness and disdain,
Only pay attention to what arises within you, and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
Consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of hostility against the individual, saturated so to say with the hatred of those who have reconciled themselves mutely and morosely to their own insipid duty. When a man steps out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of sheer life.
On adults taking ourselves too seriously: The grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has no worth.
It is important and full of new experience to find one’s own work again in a strange handwriting. Read the verses as though they were strange, and you will feel in your innermost self how very much they are yours.— It has been a joy for me to read this sonnet and your letter many times; I thank you for them both.
We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.
This step forward will … change the love experience that now is full of error, alter it fundamentally, refashion it into a relationship meant to be between one human being and another, no longer between man and wife. And this more human love (which will consummate itself infinitely thoughtfully and gently, and well and clearly in binding and loosing) will be something like that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love which consists in the mutual guarding, bordering and saluting of two solitudes.
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