Letters to a Young Poet -Rainer Maria Rilke (with quotes)

 Letters to a Young Poet is a book of collection of 10 letters sent by Rainer Maria Rilke to Mr. Kappus(Franz Xavier Kappus), a student at Theresian Military Academy in Austria. Rilke previously studied at the lower school of same academy at Sankt Poelten(wikipedia). Rilke quit his study there and pursued his career as poet. Mr. Kappus was in dilema on whether he should be poet as Rilke or pursue his military career. The letters are what Rilke has to say about being a poet and other matters such as reading, love, sex, self-understanding, solitude, patience, difficulties in life, god and so on. The letters date from February 17th, 1903 to  26th December(the day after christmas), 1908. So, they are basically more than a hundred years old letters and yet they can help reader to understand life as a whole. Or at least it makes one move in a direction to understand life.

Normally, I start reading with my head full of doubts and an eagerness to reject the ideas in any book. People say I am very critical and some even say that I have a negative mind. But as soon as the clouds of doubts are cleared and I start seeing the light, I fall in love with the book. I enjoy being wronged by the writer and his/her creation.

In the first few pages I didn't get used to with Rilke's writing. But later on, I felt like these letters are addressed to me and that I can learn so much from these. I was thinking of people I could recommend the book to while reading it. This is definitely one of the best read, especially for the young ones.

Quotes from the book:

·         No body can advise you and help you. Nobody. There's only one way - Go into yourself.

·         if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one should not write at all.

·         Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into

·         for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

·         Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

·         Allow your judgements their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep with in and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

·         In this there is no measuring with time...being an artist means ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap and stands confidently in the storm of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

·         What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain.

·         What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.

·         If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

·         Must he (God) not be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed?

·         That something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

·         It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

·         Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for  the individual to ripen to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

·         Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it alsohad to give it an easy form, cheap, safe and sure, as public amusements are.

·         It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude(the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way.

·         The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions.

·         How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

some place and writer mentioned in the book: J.P. Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, Richard Dehmel, Worpswede near Bremen, Marcus Aurelius

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