Rilke. Letters. Art. Life.
August 15 2010

Rainer Maria Rilke. Don't assume everyone knows of him (ignore the Maria- Rilke was a man.)

If you do know of him, let the Pianobabbler restock your memory's stores.

If you don't know of him, then do. Do, as in, do yourself a service.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) left behind poems of pericardial essence and luminescence. His writing express the genome of the human soul.

His poems. Those who know them know they enrich life, and do so like the truest friend, more deeply over time.

Music inheres in Rilke's poems, most notably in his Sonnets to Orpheus.

I don't mean, however, to speak of his poetry here. I want to shine a light on the refuge and provender with which Rilke enriched artists everywhere, for all time: Letters to a Young Poet.

Rilke wrote these 10 letters between 1902 and 1908 to, yes, a young poet, a 19-year-old Austrian student, Franz Kappus.

Why bother with 10 aged letters?

Because the letters round in the artist's universe. Like a paper-mâché maker modelling the world, Rilke pastes words onto the realities and psychologies of being an artist. The result is profound description and inspiring prescription. What artists should do. What artists shouldn't do. What they feel. Why they feel it. Their ups, their downs, their dangers, powers, authority, limits, their day-to-day, life-to-death, mundane, sublime, particle and wave, Earth and spirit, loved and loathed ways.

Just as the mapmaker draws the map, but we execute the navigation, so Rilke demarcates the artist's inner and outer terrain, but leaves to us the drawing and hewing. He has not designed Letters to a Young Poet as a creative writing manual. He gives us instead a survival guide for the creative spirit. He hands on to us the seed, not the tree. The ship, not the voyage.

The Pianobabbler can imagine no artist whom Letters to a Young Poet would not benefit. Benefit, as in find their lives forever influenced and changed, for the better and the best.

The Letters speak for themselves. I won't paraphrase. Instead a few quotations:

• "No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write." (From Letter One)
  


• "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." (From Letter Three)


• "People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
  "To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." (From Letter Seven)


• "Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature." (From Letter Ten)

Read. Enjoy. Benefit. Go into yourself. Letters to a Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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