Letters To A Young Poet

The Letters (2)

Two

                                                                                                                                               Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy),

April 5th, 1903

You must forgive me, my dear sir, for only today gratefully remembering your letter of February 24th: I have been unwell all this time, not exactly ill, but oppressed by an influenza-like lassitude that has made me incapable of anything. And finally, as i simply did not get better, I came to this southerly sea, the beneficence of which has helped me once before. But I am not yet well, writing comes hard to me, and so you must take these few lines for more. 

Of course you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and only bear with the answer which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed; for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed. 

Today I wanted to tell you just two things more:                          Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things: thither irony never descends-- and when you come thus close to the edge of greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitude springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the influence of serious things either it will fall from you ( if it is something fortuitous ), or else it will ( if it really innately belongs to you ) strenghten into a stern instrument and take its place in the series of tools with which you will have to shape your art. 

And the second point about which I wanted to tell you today is this:
Of all my books just a few are indispensable to me, and two even are always among my things, wherever i am. They are about me here too: the Bible, and the books of great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen. I wonder whether you know his works. You can easily get them, for some of them have come out in very good translation in Reclam's  Universal Library. Get yourself the little volume of Six Stories of J. P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels Lyhne, and start on the first story in the former, called "Mogens." A world will come over you, the happiness, the abudance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,-- it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys. 

if i am to say from whom i have learned something about the nature of creative work, about its depth and everlastingness, there are but two names I can mention: that of Jacobsen, the great, great writer, and that of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all artists living today. 

And all success upon your ways! 

Yours: 

Rainer Maria Rilke