Letters to a Young Poet

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden
12 August 1904

I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, even though I have hardly anything helpful to say-- hardly anything useful. You have encountered many very sad experiences, which by now have passed. You say that even their passing was difficult and depressing. Please, dear friend, think about this: Did not this great sadness rather pass through you? Did not much within you change? Did you not, somehow at some place in your being, change while you were sad? The only sad experiences which are dangerous and bad are those that one reveals to people in order to drown them out. Like illnesses treated superficially and incompetently, they retreat and, after a short pause, break out even more intensely. They gather together within the self and are life. They are life unlived, ridiculed and scorned.

Were it possible, we might look beyond the reach of our knowing and yet a bit further into the past across the farmsteads of our ancestors. Then perhaps we would endure our griefs with even greater trust than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unfamiliar. Our feelings become mute in timid shyness. Everything within us steps back; a silence ensues, and the something new, known to no one, stands in the center and is silent.

I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of tension. We perceive them as crippling because we no longer hear signs of life from our estranged emotions. We are alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our presence. For a moment everything intimate and familiar has been taken from us. We stand in the midst of a transition, where we cannot remain standing.

And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either-- it is already in the blood. And we do not find out what it was. One would easily make us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it. We cannot say who came; we shall perhaps never know. But many signals affirm that the future has stepped into us in such a way as to change itself into us, and that long before it manifests itself outwardly.

Therefore it is so important to be alone and observant when one is sad. The seemingly uneventful moment, when our future really enters in, is very much closer to reality than that other loud and fortuitous point in time, when it happens as if coming from the outside. The quieter and more patient, the more open we are when we are sad, the more resolutely does that something new enter into us, the deeper it is absorbed in us, the more certain we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our personal destiny. When it "happens" at a later time-- when it becomes obvious to others-- then we feel an intimate kinship with it. And that is necessary. It is needed and our evolvement will gradually go in that direction: nothing strange shall befall us, but rather that which has already for a long time belonged to us.

We have already had to rethink so many concepts about movement. Surely it is possible that we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate emerges from human beings; it does not enter into them from the outside. It is only because so many did not absorb their destinies while they lived in them, did not transform them into themselves, that they did not recognize what emerged from them. Their fate was so strange to them that in their confused fright they believed it must just now have entered into them. For they swore never before to have found anything similar within themselves. As people were mistaken so long about the movement of the sun, so it is that people are yet mistaken about the movement of what is to come. The future stands firm and still, my dear Franz, but we are moving in infinite space.

Why should we not encounter difficulties?

To return to the subject of aloneness: It becomes increasingly clear that it is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one's self and act as though it were not so--- that is all. How much better, however, that we concede we are solitary beings; yes, that we assume it to be true. Our minds will certainly reel at the thought, for all points on which we could heretofore focus shall be taken from us. There is nothing newer and familiar left us; everything is in the distance, unendingly far away.

A person would have a similar feeling, were he, with practically no preparation or transition, taken from his home and placed on the summit of a high mountain. It would be a feeling of unequaled uncertainty-- a vulnerability to a nameless something would nearly destroy him. He would think he were falling or would believe himself flung out into space or burst asunder into a thousand pieces. What a colossal lie his mind would have to invent to catch up with the condition of his senses and to clarify it. That is how all sense of distance, all measurements change for the one who is alone.

Some of these changes cause many to lose all perspective. And, as with the man on the pinnacle of the mountain, unusual imaginings emerge and strange sensations arise that seem to grow beyond everything endurable. But it is necessary that we experience that also. We must accept our existence to the greatest extent possible; everything, the unprecedented also, needs to be accepted. That is basically the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing that we could encounter.

The fact that people have been cowards in that regard has caused infinite harm to life. The experiences that one calls "ghosts," the entire spirit world, death, all these related things have been forced out of life through daily resistance to such an extent that the senses with which we could grasp them have become atrophied. And that is not even considering the question of God.

The fear of the unexplainable impoverished not only the existence of the individual, but also caused the relationship of one person to another to be limited. It is as though fear has caused something to be lifted out of the riverbed of limitless possibilities to a fallow stretch of shore where nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that causes the unspeakable monotonous and unrenewed human condition to repeat itself again and again. It is the aversion to anything new, any predictable experience, which is believed to be untenable.

Only he who can expect anything, who does not exclude even the mysterious, will have a relationship to life greater than just being alive; he will exhaust his own wellspring of being. If we liken the existence of the individual to a room of larger or smaller size, it is evident that most people are familiar with only a corner of their room, perhaps a window seat or space where they pace to and fro. In that way they have a certain security. Yet every uncertainty fraught with danger is so much more human. It is the same uncertainty that motivated the prisoners in Edgar Allen Poe's stories to explore the form of their terrible prisons and not to be a stranger to the unspeakable horrors of their presence there.

But we are not prisoners. There are no traps or snares set for us, and there is nothing that should frighten or torture us. We are placed into life, into the element best suited to it. Besides, through thousands of years of adaptation, we have acquired such a resemblance to this life, that we, if we stood still, would hardly be distinguishable from our surroundings. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they belong to us. If dangers are present, we must try to love them. And if we fashion our life according to that principle, which advises us to embrace that which is difficult, then that which appears to us to be the very strangest will become the most worthy of our trust, and the truest.

How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of all mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous. Perhaps everything fearful is basically helplessness that seeks our help.

You must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, when a sadness arises within you of such magnitude as you have never experienced, or when a restlessness overshadows all you do, like light and the shadow of clouds gliding over your hand. You must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed? You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, then consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign to it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress.

So much is happening within you at present, dear Mr. Kappus. You need to be as patient as someone ill and as optimistic as one recuperating, for perhaps you are both. And more: You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait. And that, above all, to the extent that you are your physician, you must do now.

Do not scrutinize yourself too closely. Do not draw conclusions too quickly from that which is happening to you. Just allow it to happen. Otherwise you might easily begin to look with blame (that is, morrally speaking) upon your past, which, of course, is very much a part of everything that you encounter now. The influences of the vagaries, the wishes and the longings of your boyhood upon your present life are not the ones you remember or pass judgement on. The unusual conditions of a lonely and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, vulnerable to so many influences, and at the same time so distant from all real connections with life, that, whenever a vice may have entered, one may not simply call it a vice. One must, in any case, be very careful with that nomenclature. It is often the name of the crime upon which a life shatters, not the nameless and personal act itself at all. It might have been a definite necessity of this person's life, of which he may simply have availed himself.

The expending of effort seems so important to you only because you value victory too much. It is not the "great thing" that you believe to have achieved, even though you have a right to your feelings. The great thing is that there was something already present-- and you were allowed to substitute it in place of your misconceptions-- something true and real. Without it your victory also would have been a mere moral reastion without meaning. As it is, it has become a chapter in your life-- your life, dear Mr. Kappus, I think of it with so many wishes for you.

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

If I were to tell you one more thing, it would be this: Do not believe that the one who seeks to comfort you lives without difficulty the simple and humble words that sometimes help you. His life contains much grief and sadness and he remains far behind you. Were it not so, he would not have found those words.