Letters to a Young Poet

Rome
14 May 1904

My dear Mr. Kappus,

Much time has elapsed since I received your last letter. Do not hold it against me. First it was work, then interruptions, and finally illness that over and over again kept me from responding. I did so wish it to come out of quiet and good days. Now I feel a bit better. The beginning of Spring with its nasty and changeable moods was present here too, unmistakably so. And now I am finally able to greet you (which I do so very gladly) and to respond with one thing and another to your letter, as well as I can.

I have copied your sonnet because I found it beautiful and simple and well suited to the form in which it moves so naturally, with quiet proper decorum. It is the best of your verses that I have had the privilege to read. And now I shall give you my copy of them, for I know that it is important and also a new experience to find one's own work again in someone else's handwriting. Read these verses as though you had never seen them before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much they are your own.

It was a joy for me to read this sonnet and your letter often. I thank you for both.

Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms. People have, with the help of so many conventions, resolved everything the easy way, on the easiest side of easy. But it is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.

To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the must difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people -- who are beginners in everything -- cannot yet love; they do not know how to love. They must learn it. With their whole being, with all strengths enveloping their lonely, disquieted heart, they must learn to love -- even while their heartbeat is quickening. However, the process of learning always involves time set aside for solitude. Then to love constantly and far into a lifespan is indeed aloneness, heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.

Love does not at first have anything to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being-- for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity, and lack of coherence? Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one's horizon greatly. Only in this sense, as the task to work on themselves, day and night, and to listen, ought young people use the love granted them. Opening one's self, and surrendering, and every kind of communion is not for them yet; they must for a very, very long time gather and harbor experience. It is the final goal, perhaps one which human beings as yet hardly ever seek to attain.

Young people often err, and that intensely so, in this way, since it is their nature to be impatient: They throw themselves at each other when loves comes upon them. They fragment themselves, just as they are, in all of their disarray and confusion. But what is to follow? What should fate do if this takes root, this heap of half-broken things that they call togetherness that that they would like to call their happiness?

What of their future? Everyone loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that would yet have wished to come. They lose perspective and limit opportunities. They exchange the softly advancing and retreating of gentle premonitions of the spirit for an unfruitful restlessness. Nothing can come of it; nothing, that is, but disappointment, poverty, and escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great number, like public shelters, on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is provided with as many conventions as this one: there are flotation devices of the most unusual sort; there are boats and life belts. Society has known how to create every kind of refuge conceivable. Since it is inclined to perceive love life as entertainment, it needs to display it as easily available, inexpensive, safe, and reliable, just like common public entertainment.

It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure,. They would in their own personal way, like to turn the condition in which they find themselves into something meaningful and fruitful. Their nature tells them that questions of love can be solved even less easily that everything else usually considered important, and certainly not publicly or by this or that agreement. Question s of love are personal, intimate questions, from one person to another, that in every case require a new, a special, and an exclusively personal answer. But then, having already thrown themselves together, having set no boundaries between each other, and being no longer able to differentiate, they no longer possess anything of their own. How can they on their own find the escape route that they have already blocked to that inner solitude?

They act from a sourcce of mutual helplessness. I, with the best of intentions, they wish to avoid the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example) they find themselves in the clutches of another conventional solution, one less obvious, but just as deadly. Everything surrounding them, spread wide about them, is-- convention. There, where a dull mutuality, prematurely established, is the basis for living, every action is conventional Every situation leading to such confusion has its convention, be it ever so unusual, that is, in the ordinary sense, immoral. Yes, even separation would be a conventional stop, and impersonal, coincidental decision, a weak and fruitless decision. Whoever will seriously consider the question of live will find that, as with the question of death, difficult as it is, there is no enlightened answer, no solution, not the hint of a path has yet been found. And for these two deep concerns that we carry safely disguised within us and that we pass on unresolved, for them no comforting principle will be learned, none finding general agreement.

But to the same degree that we as individuals begin to explore life, to that degree shall these deep things surface for each of us in greater intimacy. The responsibility that the difficult work of love demands of our evolvement overwhelms us; it is larger than life. We, as yet beginners, are not equal to it. If we persevere after all, and take this love upon us, accepting it as a burden and a time of training, instead of lising ourselves to the frivolous and careless game behind which people have hidden themselves, not willing to face the most serious question of their being-- then perhaps shall a small bit of progress be perceptible as well as some relief for those to come after us. That would be a great deal.

We are just now reaching the point where we can observe objectively and without judgement the relationship of one individual to a second one. Our attempts to live such a relationship are without a model. Yet, there already exists within our time frame some things intended to help our faint-hearted beginner's steps. The girl and the woman in their own new unfolding will only temporarily be imitators of male incivilities, of men's ways, and repeaters of men's careers. After the insecurity of this transition has passed, it will be shown that women, through their wealth of (often ridiculous) disguises and many changes, have continued their quest only in order to purify their own beings of the distorting influences of the other sex. The women, within whom life dwells in a more direct, fruitful, and trusting way, must, after all, have become basically more mature, more human than the man. For he is easily pulled down by the weight of the lack of physical fruitfulness, pulled down under the surface of life; he professes to love that which he arrogantly and rashly underrates.

The simple humanity of woman, brought about through pain and abasement, shall then come to light when the convention of her ultra-feminism will have been stripped off, transforming her status in the world. The men, who today cannot yet feel it coming, shall be surprised and defeated by it. One day (in northern countries trustworthy signs can already be seen and heard), the girl and the woman shall exist with her name no longer contrasted to the masculine; it shall have a meaning in itself. It shall not bring to mind complement or limitation-- only life and being: the feminine human being.

This progress shall transform the experience of love, presently full of error, opposed at first by men, who have been overtaken in their progress by women. It shall thoroughly change the love experience to the rebuilding of a relationship meant to be between two persons, no longer just between man and woman. And this more human love will be consummated, endlessly considerate and gentle, good and clear in its bonding and releasing; it shall resemble that love for which we must prepare painstakingly and with fervor, which will be comprised of two lonelinesses protecting one another, setting limits, and acknowledging one another.

And one more thing: Do not believe that this idea of a great love, which, when you were a boy, was imposed upon you, has been lost. Can you not say that since then great and good wishes have ripened within you, and resolutions too, by which you live today? I believe that this idea of love remains so strong and mighty in your memory because it was your first deep experience of aloneness and the first inner work that you have done on your life.

All good wishes for you, dear Mr. Kappus.

Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke