قريب من القلب. these letters rewired my whole brain chemistry Twelve years on and it will have been a ten
by ten span of time since you left, Rilke.
Left on high, left to below both word and
hope, hope, most of all hope, Your heart you gave,
and for that we love,
I'd like to rhyme in metered line along
the likes of you, but too long ago your
poetry graced my eyes.
What lies left's a
feeling fit for tears and joy alone, and
somber light it is,
Your maudlin days do not astonish, for
many a kindred of mine has suffered
the same, and yet, goes on.
I draw from each
going for my own, and yours I say is
of exquisite touch,
Man to man you wrote back then, both letter
and the wider world of word, and as with
most I gritted firm for any and all
male strickenings of the female fact, of
grim necessity.
But 'lo! You knew, and where you didn't, you
hoped, in a beauty of mournful bright.
Of
early on you penned this plighted dream, and
did more in a quickening page than most
in their own lifetime.
And more, and more, and more to come, Childhood
days, unhappy days, and yet every bloom
you would cherish and hold dear, Sin was not
a word allowed you said what mattered was
life, and lived to love,
In solitude and suspension flush, you
counseled attention paid to the soul of
self, Every part and every shuddering truth,
both internal and the real, Often faint,
often not enough,
Fail better. The words came after you, and
with less heart, but you would most agree, There's
lovely things in life, you said, you wrote, you
sculpted deep in tears of crystalline, One
weeps in the knowing,
But one would smile and cheer and cradle close
what you've left us dear, You felt,
and saw fit
to refract as close to thought through form, To
all, to us, to me, I cannot return,
save for scripting here,
Rainer Maria Rilke, you wrote I
felt my heart would burst, What a tremendous thrill it must have been for budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, to receive the first letter in response to his own from his literary idol, Rainer Maria Rilke.
And then, to receive nine more,
This collection has been widely read and is widely loved, Only the letters from Rilke written fromare included, which is fine, because even Rilke acknowledges several times that he is not addressing Kappus' specific questions or concerns.
Rather, he gives a loving, far reaching, all encompassing oration on how to conduct oneself as an artist, It's almost as if he knew that generations of readers would be sharing in this correspondence, and collectively gasping at the generous wisdom imparted in these missives.
Rilke emphasizes over and over the importance of solitude, of not creating art with the idea of outside reaction, and of clinging to what is "difficult" because it's there that one finds the greatest reward.
These are all good pieces of advice to any writer or artist, or even human being in general, I didn't quite connect with all of Rilke's thoughts, though, Some of them felt a bit too philosophical, pieinthesky for me, But there are many gems that make this lovely epistolary collection well worth reading,
For someone who wonders if they should be a writer:
This above all ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write Delve into yourself for a deep answer.
And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity.
For an artist discouraged with what they have accomplished thus far:
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.
It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.
For lovers, and their indelible contribution to art:
And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.
In which Rainer Maria Rilke, both mercilessly and mercifully, bashes me over the head with a baseball bat from the other side of the Great Whatever.
BREATHTAKING!!!
First book finished for the Rory Gilmorehour readathon!!! Full review to come!!! I always underline in books, either for the wise quotes that teach or the pure beauty of the passage.
About ten pages into this book, though, I gave up underlining as nearly every sentence was a combination of beauty and wisdom.
These letters to a young man he never even met! are inspiring in their honesty, teaching to cherish your solitude, "to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours.
. . 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.
"
A few gems:
"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".
"The future stands still, dear Mr, Kappus, but we move in infinite space",
"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, when 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 transofmred 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", Rilkewas a famous German poet, born in Prague, He traveled widely throughout Europe, married and had a daughter, A dozen years out of school, after Rilke had achieved some fame as a poet, a young man wrote to him asking for advice about life and poetry.
Rilke wrote ten letters to him over five years, The young boy was romantic, frail and dreamy a prisoner, so to speak, in a military boarding school where he was subject to strict discipline, bullying and humiliation.
It was the same school that Rilkes father sent him to in preparation for a career as a military officer.
And all those adjectives also applied to Rilke who had been in the identical situation, So, in a sense, Rilke poured his heart out writing to his younger self,
Some of Rilkes writings in the ten letters:
“For the creative artist there is no poverty nothing is insignificant or unimportant.
”
“There is nothing that manages to influence a work of art less than critical words, They always result in more or less unfortunate misunderstandings, Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe, Most happenings are beyond expression they exist where a word has never intruded, ”
Writing inRilke was amazingly prescient about the upcoming sexual revolution:
“Perhaps the sexes are more closely related than one would think.
Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.
This progress shall transform the experience of love, presently full of error, opposed at first by men, who have been overtaken in their progress by women.
It shall thoroughly change the love experience to the rebuilding of a relationship meant to be between two persons, no longer just between man and woman.
The men, who today cannot yet feel it coming, shall be surprised and defeated by it, ”
“Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it.
This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms.
”
“Everything you can think about in your childhood is good, ”
“Of all my books there are only a few that are indispensable to me, Two of them are constantly at my fingertips wherever I may be, They are here with me now: the Bible and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.
” Rilke particularly praises Jacobsens collection of short stories, Mogens, which I have reviewed here: sitelink goodreads. com/review/show
“We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.
It becomes increasingly clear that it aloneness is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have.
We simply are alone. One can only delude ones self and act as though it were not so that is all, ”
The second half of the book is a collection of some of his poems, Most are very accessible. Here are some sections of verse that I liked
From FOR A FRIEND
I have my dead, and I would let them go
and be surprised to see them all so cheerful,
so soon at home in beingdead, so right,
so unlike their repute.
You, you alone,
return brush past me, move about, persist
in knocking something that vibratingly
betrays you.
From ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES.
Wrapt in herself she wandered, And her deadness
was filling her like fullness,
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
From THE CATHEDRAL
In those small towns you come to realize
how the cathedrals utterly outgrew
their whole environment.
Their birth and rise,
as our own lifes too great proximity
will mount beyond our vision and our sense
of other happenings, took precedence
of all things as though that were history,
piled up in their immeasurable masses
in petrification safe from circumstance,
From THE DWARFS SONG
My hands too will always be failing me.
How hopelessly stunted they are you can see:
damp, heavy, hopping constrictedly
like little toads in wet weather.
And everything else about me too
is old and worn and sad to view
why does God delay to do
away with it altogether
From THE ORPHAN GIRLS SONG
Im no one, and no one is what I shall be.
I'm still too small to exist, I agree
but I'll always be so,
No one can need me: it's too soon now,
and tomorrow it's too late,
A very thoughtprovoking, calming read,
Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak from Wikipedia
Dear Mr, Rilke,
Assuming it to be a frequent phenomenon with you, I partake in pleasure and liberty of appointing you the receiver of yet another letter, from a besotted admirer of your wisdom and expression.
You see I have always felt that the best stories are those that we wish turned true stories that uplift us with their depths and spring us back to the surface to stay afloat stories that carry our thoughts in their seams and weave the most warm blankets to protect us in the winters of life stories that complete the halfdrawn picture, packing us to a destination of solace.
But above all, a story works best when the mind inking it knows its reader like a best friend knowing when to let her be and when to rejig her.
When the pen joins dots to create conversations between its one such holder and this distant best friend, the creations turn alive, ringing their elevating bells for years to come.
Although I laid hands on a bunch of letters your wrote to Mr, Kappus, your young poet friend, I was taken aback by the loud resonance that penetrated my soul upon reading them.
You came to bless me with your songs on life at a time when I was getting crushed under boulders of fear and anxiety with my arms turning deplorably limp to make even the smallest of difference.
These bouts are not uncommon but this time, they were of epic proportions, When the ground beneath ones ideals is suddenly shaken in virulent jolts, she looks upto the skies in hope of a miraculous intervention.
You, were mine. Like a supreme entablature, your sagacity descended upon me, stabilizing my fledgling structure, Your distilled prudence covered every open bevel, every bruised crevice in my existence and all at once, I was steady, sturdy and breathing again.
And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them, They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical, As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous.
It might be heartening for you to know that I have been attributing my strength to my doubts as much as to my beliefs.
But do not give in, request arguments, and act with this kind of attentiveness and consistency every single time, and the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life.
In fact, I have often found myself strolling on numerous evenings, absorbed in an inconsequential mist of doubts and dilemmas.
Donning the robe of a forced soloist has never stopped me from performing but has often questioned my embrace of solitude.
Is it even worth All those seconds ticking away without another pair of eyes in the vicinity
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness.You quelled my fear in the most beautiful way, You didnt deflect me from my walk, Instead you slipped an inexpressible kind of validation beneath my feet that transformed the weather all at once, Holding your finger, the hard road of complexities and predicaments turned a generous grassbed of soft, white clouds engulfing me in a feeling of beauty, tenderness, clarity and alacrity while sending buoyant tremors of spirit into my being.
Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours that is what one must arrive at,
I know I would continue to run into speedbreakers during this voyage of mine occasional skidding on account of poor reflexes on dense complexes would also be inevitable.
But both in bountiful and sick days, I would survive on your inspiring truths those that cannot be seized by time or place, those that do not have any negative cape, those that find beauty in much, those that detect a breath in dust.
If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it.. .
All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself.