Letters to a Young Poet

You should not be without a greeting from me at Christmastime, when in the midst of the festivities your feeling of aloneness is apt to weigh more heavily upon you. Whenever you notice that it looms large, then be glad about it. For what would aloneness be, you ask yourself, if it did not possess greatness? There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for any cheap or even the most banal camaraderie, for even the slightest inclination to choose the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish. Its growth is painful as the growing up of a young boy and sad as the emergence of springtime.

But that should not confuse you. What you really need is simply this--- aloneness, great inner solitude. To go within and for hours not to meet anyone---- that is what one needs to attain. To be lonely as one was lonely as a child, while adults were moving about, entangled with things that seemed big and important, because the grownups looked so officious and because one could not understand any of their doings--- that must be the goal. And when you realize one day that their activities are superficial, that their careers are paralyzed and no longer linked with life, then why not look at the world as a child would wee it--- out of the depths of your own world, out of the breadth of your own aloneness, which is itself work and rank and career? Why should anyone wish to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for resistance and disdain, since the incomprehension is aloneness, and resistance and disdain are an involvement in the things you seed to escape from.

Think, dear friend, reflect on the world that you carry within yourself. And name this thinking what you wish. It might be recollections of your childhood or yearning for your own future. Just be sure that you observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you. Your innermost happening is worth all your love. You must somehow work on that.

Do not expend too much courage or time to clarify your position to others. I know your career is difficult and I anticipated your complaint and knew it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot reassure you. I can only advise you to think seriously about this: Are not all careers the same, filled with demands and people filled with animosity toward the individual, at the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty? The situation that you are now obliged to tolerate is not burdened any heavier with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other situation. If there are some who outwardly give the impression of granting more freedom, know that there really exists none that is related to the important things that make up real life. The individual person who senses his aloneness, and only he, is like a thing subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws. If a person goes out into the dawn or gazes out into the evening filled with happenings, if he senses what happens there, then all situations fall away from him as from someone dead, even though he stands in the midst of life.

You, dear Mr. Kappus, as an officer in the military, need to experience this feeling. You must realize that you would have felt the same way in any existing career now. Yes, aside from that, independent of career, if you had sought connections in society, you would not have been spared this feeling of constraint. It is the same everywhere, but that is not a reason for fear or sadness. If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you. The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands. Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate. The children too, are still the same as you were as a child, sad and happy in the same way. And if you thing about your childhood, then you can again live among them. The lonely children--- where the adults count for nothing and their dignity has no worth.

And if it is distressing and agonizing for you to thing of your childhood and of the simplicity and silence so close akin to it, because you no longer believe in God, who is constantly appearing there, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Is it not rather true that you have not yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think a child can hold him like a little stone? Or do you not rather agree that he who might have him, him whom men can bear only with great effore and whose weight crushes the aged ones? Do you think that the one possessing him could lose him like a little stone? Or do you not rather agree that he who might have him could be lost by him? However, if you conclude that he did not exist in your childhood and not before that, if you surmise that Christ was deluded by his yearning and that Mohammed was betrayed by his pride--- and if you, with great dismay, feel that he does not exist, even during this hour, while we are speaking of him, what right have you then to miss him, like someone out of the past, him, who never existed, and to seek him as though he were lost?

Why don't you think of him as the coming one, who has been at hand since eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree, with us as its leaves? What is keeping you from hurling his birth into evolving times and from living your life as though it were one painful beautiful in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see that everything that happens becomes a beginning again and again? Could it not be His beginning, since a beginning in itself is always so beautiful? If, however, he is the most perfect one, would not what is less than perfect have to precede him, so that he can choose himself from great abundance? Would not He have to be the last one, in order to envelop everything within himself? And what sense would our existence make, if the one we longed for had already had his existence in the past?

By extracting the most possible sweetness out of everything, just as the bees gather hone, you thus build Him. With any insignificant thing, even with the very smallest thing --- if only it is done out of love-- we begin, with work, with a time of rest following, with keeping silent or with a small lonely joy, with everything that we do alone, without one whom we shall not experience in this lifetime, even as our ancestors could not experience us. Yet they who belong to the distant past are in us, serving as impetus, as a burden to our fate, as blood that can be heard rushing, as a gesture rising our of the depths of time.

Is there anything now that can rob you of the hop of someday being in Him, who is the ultimate, in the infinite future, as once He was in your past?

Celebrate Christmas, my dear Mr. Kappus, with this reverent feeling that He perhaps needs exactly this, your fear of life, in order to begin. Perhaps these very days of your transition are the times that He is touched by everything within you. Perhaps you are influencing him, just as you as a child with breathless effort left your mark on Him. Be patient and without rancor and believe that the least we can do is to make His evolving no more difficult than the earth does for spring, when it wishes to come.

Be glad and comforted,

Yours,