On Being a Young Poet

Every few years I find myself set adrift, for one reason or another placed in an emotional or moral position somewhat off center and in need of guidance. It is in times like these when invariably someone reminds me about Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."

I first came across this text, and Rilke at all, in my first year of my first attempt at college, ten years ago. It was a required text for incoming freshmen! Of course, I was too young, too headstrong at the time, probably like any other kid fresh out in the world, to admit that there were deep issues, dark questions, that one might need advice, not in answering, but in living. As Rilke puts it, "be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

This quote has been a favorite for many years, though I still don't fully understand it. Another thing that it's taken me a long time to wrap my head around is the necessity of solitude, something that Rilke stresses on almost every page of his letters. Solitude in order to go into yourself, to find your reason to write and to seek out the dreams, memories, impressions that make one's internal world. Solitude in order to find the patience to allow everything to gestate, the acceptance of doing what is difficult and therefor necessary, the clarity of the senses beneath the surface and multiplicity of the world where one can actually create. Solitude in order to grow into one that can love and be loved, a "love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

These days I exist mostly in a happy solitude, with my stories and new kitten Ruby and lots of music, a happiness that is mainly broken only when other people are involved. It is strange to think that for years I sought out the company of others, not because I actually wanted to be around them, but because I was under the impression that I should, because it was easier to become involved in order to hide from myself and my possibilities behind the social masks of sex, drugs, rock and roll. One of the few kinds of occasions I would actually enjoy myself in public in was being on stage, playing a show. Talk about the performance of everyday life. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy being around other people, but that I have learned that I require a much more immense amount of time to myself, which when I have it allows me to interact with others in a much more reciprocal and centered way, as well as get a lot of writing done.

"Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars."

It is also interesting, and immensely inspiring, to think that Rilke was twenty-eight, my age, when he wrote these letters, and yet so wise (or so precocious with the weight of the world, though one feels that he really felt and bore that weight in its fullest understanding). I can only bow my head.

[quotes from M.D. Herter Norton's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," though the Stephen Mitchell translation I linked to above is far superior, as Mitchell gets the emotional necessity of Rilke's writing.]