fragments

I´m reading "Letters to a Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke and have been recording the parts that, at the moment, seem most relevant to me.



"...finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing,
silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn’t disturb it
any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to
question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps
answer."

“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening
like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms 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.”

“But that is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must
always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob
them of their candor and innocence!”


“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then
everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more
reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished,
but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young,
so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love
the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very
foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you
now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live
everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you
will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps
you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially
blessed and pure way of living; train your for that — but take whatever comes,
with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of
your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything.”


“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. for those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.”