Letters to a Young Poet

Paris
the day after Christmas, 1908

You should know, dear Franz, how happy I was to have received this beautiful letter of yours. The messages that you sent me, sincere and frankly expressed as they are again, were good news to me. The longer I thought about it, the more I felt them to be really good. I actually wanted to write this so that you could receive it by Christmas Eve; but because of the amount and variety of work with which I am living uninterruptedly this winter, good old Christmastime has approached so rapidly that I hardly had time to attend to the most necessary tasks, much less write. But I have thought of you often during these holidays and have imagined how tranquil you must be in your linely fort between empty hills, attached my great southern winds, as if they mean to devour them in large chunks.

The silence must be immense where there is space for such sounds and movements. And when one realizes that the presence of the distant sea and its melody is added to all this, perhaps as the innermost tone in this prehistoric harmony, then I can only wish that you trustingly and patiently allow that grand solitude to work in you. It is no longer possible to be erased from your life. It shall be imminent in all that you experience and all that you do. It will act as an anonymous influence, akin to how ancestral blood constantly moves and merges with your own and links with that of the individual, never to be unlinked. It is gently decisive at each crossroad of our life.

Yes, I am glad that you now have this certain, steady, safe career experience. This title, this uniform, this military service-- all of these tangible but restrictive things-- in surroundings, with a small staff equally isolated, take on a seriousness and an importance above the usual playfulness, the waiting-for-the-time-to-pass characteristic of the military career. This environment not only necessitates vigilence in application, and allows for independent attentiveness to detail, but it actually provides training for these qualities. To be in time, that is all we need.

Art also is only a way of life, and we can, no matter how we live, and without knowing it, prepare ourselves for it. With each encounter with truth one draws nearer to reaching communion with it, more so than those in unreal, half-artistic careers-- by pretending proximity to are, they actually deny and attack the existence of all art. All those in the field of journalism and nearly all the critics do it, as well as three-fourths of those engaged in literature or who wish to call it that. I am glad that you have overcome the danger of being caught up in such a realm, and that you are somewhere in a rugged reality alone and courageous.

May the year ahead of you keep and strengthen you in that resolve.

Always,
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke