Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of ten letters written by Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a young officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. Over the course of ten beautiful letters, Rilke advises Kappus on how a poet should feel, love, and seek truth.
What follows are some excerpts I paraphrase from his letters, for anyone (like me) who’s learning to love the questions more than the answers…
“You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in nature to whom he has attached himself.”
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
“We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”
“All our sadnesses are moments of tension, that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living… We are alone with this alien thing… We stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. This is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and stark moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The still, open and patient we are in our moment of sadness, so much deeper does the new presence enter us, and so much more will it be our destiny. It has always belonged to us – we will learn to realize that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without them.”
“The future stands firm, but we move in infinite space.”
“Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in what is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, always.”