Letters To A Young Poet

The Letters (5)

Five

Rome, October 29th, 1903

MY DEAR SIR, 

I received your letter of August 29th in Florence, and not till now--two months later--am I telling you of it. Forgive this dilatoriness--but I do not like writing letters while traveling, because I need more for letter-writing than the most necessary implements: some quiet and solitude and a not too incidental hour. 

We arrived in Rome about six weeks ago, at a time when it was still the empty, hot, fever-discredited Rome, and this circumstance, together with other practical difficulties in getting settled, helped to make it seem that the unrest around us would not cease and the foreignness lay with the weight of homelessness upon us. Add to this that Rome ( if one does not yet know it ) has an oppressingly sad effect for the first few days: through the lifeless and doleful museum atmosphere it exhales, through the abundance of its pasts, fetched-forth and laboriously upheld pasts ( on which a small present subsists ), through the immense overestimation, sustained by savants and philologists and copied by the average traveler in Italy, of all these disfigured and dilapidated things, which at bottom are after all no more than chance remains of another time and of a life that is not and must not be ours. Finally, after weeks of being daily on the defensive, one finds oneself again, if still somewhat confused, and one says to oneself: no, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, continuously admired by generations and patched and mended by workmen's hands, signify nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value;--but there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere. Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many squares over white stone basins and spread out in wide spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up their murmuring to the night that is large and starry here and soft with winds. And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues and flights of stairs, stairs devised by Michelangelo, stairs that are built after the pattern of downward-gliding waters--broadly bringing forth step out of step in their descent like wave out of wave. Through such impressions one collects oneself, wins oneself back again out of the pretentious multiplicity that talks and chatters there ( and how talkative it is! ), and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part. 

I am still living in the city, on the Capitol, not far from the finest equestrian statue that has come down to us from Roman art--that of Marcus Aurelius; but in a few weeks I shall move into a quiet simple room, an old flat-roofed summerhouse, that lies lost way deep in a large park, hidden from the town, its noise and incident. There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet, from which I expect the gift of good and industrious hours. . . . 

From thence, when I shall be more at home, I will write you a longer letter, further discussing what you have written me. Today I must only tell you ( and perhaps it is wrong of me not to have done this before ) that the book announced in your letter ( which was to contain works of yours ) has not arrived here. Has it gone back to you, perhaps from Worpswede? ( For one may not forward parcels to foreign countries. ) This is the most favorable possibility, and I would like to know it confirmed. I hope there is no question of loss--which, the Italian mails being what they are, would not be anything exceptional--unfortunately. 

I would have been glad to get this book ( as I would anything that gives a sign of you ); and verses that you have written meantime I shall always ( if you will confide them to me ) read and read again and experience as well and as sincerely as I can. With wishes and greetings, 

Yours: 

Rainer Maria Rilke.