Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics) (original 1929; udgave 2012)

In reading comments and reviews of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water, others recommended this short compilation of letters by Rilke. In these 10 letters Rilke distills general life advice for another writer, another poet, who is struggling at the same military boarding school he went to years before.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes (in italics) with some comments:

I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. At its sources you will find the answer to the question, whether you must write.

Here is a writer writing to another writer. I believe this advice applies to all in the struggle of finding one’s life work. Yet, I can’t help but feel Rilke is too dismissive of the external, of others. I am not a writer, and my life’s work is not explicitly creative. Perhaps that’s a needed emphasis of some.

I wanted only to advice you to progress quietly and seriously in your evolvement. You could greatly interfere with that process if you look outward and expect to obtain answers from the outside – answers which only your innermost feeling in your quietest hour can perhaps give you.

For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.

Love this one. “Life is about discovering the right questions more than having the right answers.”

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way…. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us.

To return to the subject of aloneness: it becomes increasingly clear that is it 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.

On this idea, I can’t help but wonder if he’s stating a half-truth. Could we not also add in the same breath that while, it’s true, we are alone, aren’t we also connected and dependent upon others? Couldn’t we also say, “How much better that we concede we are communal beings?” I think both ideas are true on a profound level, one of those paradoxical truths of existence. Maybe because we live in an extroverts’ world, we need this emphasis on solitude for the introverts.

Overall, Rilke’s Letters were delightful, chock full of wisdom and insights. Recommended to all, particularly those going into the arts or devoted, perhaps called, to creative pursuits. ( )

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What can I say about Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet that hasn’t already been said? One of the few books that I’ve read multiple times, each time I read it I discover something new that stands out and speaks to me from a different perspective. Even in my umpteenth reading of the book,my favorite quote remains, “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 is is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

This translation by Stephen Mitchell is my favorite because it captures the beauty and lyricism inherent in the poetic prose of this much beloved poet. ( )

This book is beautiful, and I wish I had read it sooner--only I don't think I would have understood it or related to it half as much as I do now. ( )