Letters to a Young Esther, Letter 8

In a letter to Mr. Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke discusses the importance of sorrows and solitude. He suggests that great sorrows can change us from within and that it is important to be open and attentive when we are sad. Rilke believes that sorrows are moments of tension that can bring something new and unknown into our lives. He emphasizes the need to accept and embrace solitude, as it is a part of our existence. Rilke encourages Mr. Kappus to face his fears and challenges with courage, as they may be opportunities for growth and transformation. He advises against overanalyzing and self-judgment, and instead, encourages Mr. Kappus to let things happen and trust in the process of transformation. Rilke concludes by reminding Mr. Kappus of his yearning for greatness and encourages him to see his struggles as a part of his journey towards the still greater. Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 8, August 12, 1904 I want to talk for a while, dear Mr. Kappus, although I have hardly anything useful to say. You have had many great sorrows, and they've passed, and you say that even this passing has been hard for you and left you out of sorts. But please ask yourself if these great sorrows haven't gone right to your core, and if some inner region of your being has not changed while you were sad? Only those sorrows that one drags out in public are dangerous. Like sicknesses treated superficially, they just recur. They gather within and become unlived, spoiled, wasted life of which one can die. If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little beyond our intuitions, perhaps we would then bear our sorrows with greater trust than we do our joys. For those are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown. Our feelings go silent in shy captivity. Everything within us steps back. A quiet arises, this new thing that no one knows stands revealed in our midst, hushed. I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension that we fear might cripple us because we are no longer in touch with our banished feelings. Now we are alone with the strangeness that has appeared. Everything trusted and familiar is, for a moment, taken from us, and we find ourselves caught in what we cannot stop. That is also why sorrow passes. The new in us, that which has come toward us, has entered our heart, is in its innermost chamber. It is in our blood, and we have not learned yet what it is. One could easily convince us that nothing has happened, yet we have changed, as a house changes when a guest is entered. We cannot say what has entered. We may never know. But there are many indications that the future enters us just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens. That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad, because the seemingly uneventful moment when our future steps in is so much closer to life than any loud occurrence that happens, as it were from the outside. The more patient, quiet, and open we are toward sorrow, the deeper and truer does the new move into us and become our fate. Then when it happens, we recognize it as already related to us, and when on a later day our culture experiences it too, it will seem familiar as if our own. This is necessary. It is necessary to recognize that nothing alien befalls us, but only that to which our lives already belong. After all the views and concepts we have to think enough, we will eventually learn that what we call fate doesn't come to us from the outside, because so many haven't lived their calling, their lives seem lived without conscious intention. To them, in their confusion, the arc of fate resembles nothing they have ever known before. Just as for so long we were mistaken about the movement of the sun, we are still mistaken about what lies ahead of us in time. The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus. We, however, drift in infinite space. How could it not be hard for us? To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is no way we can choose or avoid it. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if it were not so. This is all we can do. much better to realize from the start that that is what we are and proceed from there. It can, of course, make our head spin, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us. No longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far. Imagine a person taken out of his room and, without preparation or transition, placed in the heights of a great mountain. He would feel an unparalleled insecurity, an almost annihilating abandonment to the nameless. He would feel he was falling into outer space or shattering into a thousand pieces. What enormous invention would his brain concoct in order to make sense of this? In such a way, do all measures and distances change for the one who realizes his solitude? These changes are often sudden and, as with the person on the mountain peak, bring strange feelings and almost unbearable imaginings, but that also is necessary for us to experience, even essential. We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us, the courage to meet what is strangest, most awesome, and most inexplicable. The tendency of people to be fearful of those experiences they call apparitions or assign the spirit world, including death, has done infinite harm. All these things so naturally related to us, not to mention God, have been driven away by our knee-jerk resistance to the point where our capacity to sense them has atrophied. Fear of the mysterious has not only impoverished our inner lives, but diminished relations between us. These relations have been dragged, so to speak, from the river of endless possibilities and stuck on the dry bank where nothing happens, for it is not only sluggishness that makes human relations so unspeakably monotonous, it is the aversion to any new, unforeseen experience we are not sure we can control. But only someone who is open to everything, who excludes nothing, even the least explainable, will experience a living connection to others and will, from that, create his own authentic experience. For it is we who assign to our own existence a greater or lesser dimension. Take for example the space we inhabit, a narrow strip by the door or a spot by the window. That's how we make things safe for ourselves. And yet a dangerous insecurity is so much more human, like the prisoners in Poe's stories who grope along the confines of their ghastly dungeons so that no aspect of their enclosure is foreign to them. But we are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us. There is nothing that should terrify or torment us. Through a fortunate mimicry of our natural surroundings, we have grown so adapted to life after thousands of years that we can hardly be distinguished from the living forms around us. We have no reason to distress our world, for it is not against us. If our world has fears, they are our fears. If it has an abyss, it belongs to us. When dangers appear, we must try to love them. And if we will live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what seems most difficult will become our truest and most trusted friend. How could we forget the myths about dragons, who at the last moment transform into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage. Perhaps every terror is, at its core, something helpless that wants our help. So dear Mr. Kappus, do not be afraid when a sorrow as great as any you've known seems about to engulf you, casting a shadow over all of you, over all of what you do. Remember when you fear what might fall you, that life has not abandoned you, that it is holding you, and out of its web you cannot fall. Why would you want to exclude from your existence any unrest, any pain, any heaviness? For you don't know yet how these things will shape you. Why do you want to torture yourself with questions about where all this may be coming from and where it is going? For you know that you are in the midst of a passage and nothing could be more desired than transformation. If there is some illness in your system, think of it this way. Illness is the means by which an organism frees itself from invasion. Then the organism must only be helped to be sick, to break through into the full sickness, for that is the way forward. So much is happening within you, dear Mr. Kappas. You must be patient as an invalid and as a convalescent, for perhaps you are both. And more, you are also the doctor who has to look after yourself. But there are, in every illness, days when the doctor can do little more than wait. And that is what you, as your own physician, must do above all. Don't examine yourself too much. Don't jump so swiftly to conclusions about what's happening to you. Just let it happen. You were too quick to reproach yourself about your past, especially morally, which relates to all you're feeling today. What the errors, wishes, and longings of your boyhood are working in you is not what you were remembering or feeling guilty about. The burdens on a lonely, helpless child are so heavy, so vulnerable, and so isolated from daily give and take that when it comes to advice, you may hardly mention it without commenting on further advice. One must above all be so careful naming things. It is so often on the name of a crime that a life founders, not on the nameless and personal acts of self, which perhaps, in context, was actually a precise necessity. You devote so much energy to these matters because you place too high a value on your own moral victory, which is not the greatness you really seek. Instead of a moralistic reaction without any broader meaning, let it now become a vignette in your life, dear Mr. Kappas, for which I have such great wishes. Do you remember how you yearned from childhood for greatness? I see now how it is a yearning from the great to the still greater. That's why it doesn't cease being difficult. It's also why it never ceases to grow. And if I may still say something, it is this. Do not believe that he who seeks to console you lives without struggle. His life has much troubles and sorrow, and he remains far behind yours. Were that otherwise, he would never have found these words. Your Rainer Maria Rilke