Franz Kappus was my age, 19 years old, when, suffocated by his future career in the military despite his artistic inclinations, wrote a letter to one of the most renowned German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet is a compilation of Rilke’s letters in their years of missives, teeming with advice not just on poetry but on growing up, God, sexuality, and human existence as a whole. And somehow, despite being written in 1902, the letters feel like a display of my own mind. It’s one of those texts that articulate the inarticulable so timelessly and universally. As soon as I started reading, not only could I not look away, but I couldn’t stop sharing Rilke’s advice with everyone I knew. So, alas, here are some of my favorite bits of wisdom.
1.Don’t be afraid of the inarticulable.
Something I always found frustrating growing up, and even more so when I got to college, was the inability for people, whether it be educators or friends, to allow things to be simply unsayable. Western reason must grasp and categorize everything, and what is lost is the ability to exist in our questions, to love them simply for the process of searching for an answer rather than the answer itself. “People have tended,” he writes, “to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light.” But we cannot learn or grow from what is easy and definable. Fear of the inexplicable is what renders “the individual existence poorer.”
Rilke writes, “be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.” In other words, there is a beauty, an experience, a significance in the questions themselves. It is process which provides one with knowledge, not quick and easy definitions.
2. Look inwardly, and pay close attention to what arises in you instinctually.
One of Rilke’s most central theses in his letters is that before one sits down to write, or share wisdom, or do anything else, they must first turn inwardly and embrace solitude: “What is needed is this and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours—that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.”
By solitude Rilke doesn’t just imply alone time, but looking deeply into even the unconscious parts of the self, where there is pain, anger, and even the things we don’t want to admit. What we find here cannot always be measured or calculated, but it is the only place where we find true language and art: “To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of it’s sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.” Again, we return to process. We cannot expect what will arise in us when we look inward; we simply have to experience it.
3. The worth of art is not determined by subjective criticism. Good art is a product of necessity.
“This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write?”
Rilke poses this question to Kappus early on in his letters, and it is one that stumped me. Why do we do the things we love? Why do we write poetry? Why do we play piano or paint or anything else? Someone could answer this “for money,” or “for validation.” But, out of his love of solitude, and just as much his love for poetry, Rilke’s answer is out of necessity. Art cannot be created for someone else, or as a means to an end. It has to be an instinct.
He writes when you turn inwardly, “your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion of your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity.”
This is, I think, a piece of advice that is difficult to grapple with. Oftentimes when we create something we’re proud of, we cannot finalize its worth until it has been externally validated. The consequence is art created not for creation’s sake, but for the expectations of others and the status quo of our time. I think Rilke’s advice is incredibly important to internalize and then put into practice. Create because you need to create, not because there is something to gain from it, other than relief and self-expression.
4. Beauty, knowledge, and joy come from the process of existence and creation, not from finitude.
We don’t get to see precisely what Kappus writes to Rilke. But based on his responses in a letter written in Rome in 1903, we can infer he worried that he was losing God. Rilke’s response, and probably my all-time favorite excerpt, was: “Why don’t you think of him as a coming god, who since eternity has lain ahead of us, the future one, the eventual fruit of a tree of which we are the leaves? What prevents you from casting his birth out into the times of becoming and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?” (29).
Typically we look at all our beliefs, in God or otherwise, as fixed and divine rather than as things we take part in the creation of. I find Rilke’s perspective profoundly beautiful. Everything is a beginning, a chance to create and engage in the process of becoming, and to pretend like goodness or unity is utterly lost because of one thing gone awry is a misreading of it all.
These four pieces were just some of my favorite excerpts from the text. And, I must admit, none of this is free from my own projections and interpretations. But that’s what makes a short and universal book like Letters to a Young Poet so everlasting. A letter tells you so much about both the writer and the reader, and every time we open that book, we become the reader just as much as Kappus was. Wisdom, like Rilke’s God, is living and breathing and in the process of being realized. So dive into Rilke and take with it what you will.