Letters To A Young Poet

The Letters (10)

Ten

Paris, the day after Christmas, 1908

You must know, dear Mr. Kappus, how glad I was to have that lovely letter from you. the news you give me, real and tellable as it now is again, seems good to me, and, the longer I have thought it over, the more I have felt it to be in fact good. I really wanted to write you this for Christmas Eve; but what with work, in which I am living this winter, variously and uninterruptedly, the ancient holiday approached so fast that I had hardly any time left to attend to the most necessary errands, much less to write. 

But I have thought of you often during these holidays and imagined how quiet you must be in your lonely fort among the empty hills, upon which those big southerly winds precipitate themselves as though they would devour them in great pieces. 

The stillness must be immense in which such sounds and movements have room, and when one thinks that to it all the presence of the far-off sea comes chiming in as well, perhaps as the inmost tone in that prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish for you that you are confidently and patiently letting that lofty solitude work upon you which is no more to be stricken out of your life; which in everything there is ahead of you to experience and to do will work as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, much as in us blood of ancestors ceaselessly stirs and mingles with our own into that unique, not repeatable being which at every turning of our life we are. 

Yes: I am glad you have that steady expressible existence with you, that title, that uniform, that service, all that tangible and limited reality, which in such surroundings, with a similarly isolated and not numerous command, takes on seriousness and necessity, implies a vigilant application above and beyond the military profession's tendency to play and to pass the time, and not only allows but actually cultivates a self-reliant attentiveness. And to be among conditions that work at us, that set us before big natural things from time to time, is all we need. 

Art too is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have surmounted the danger of falling into this sort of thing and are somewhere in a rough reality being solitary and courageous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that. 

Ever yours: 

Rainer Maria Rilke