Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden
August 12, 1904
I want to
talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost
nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word.
You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even
this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself
whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps
many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep
inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The
only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry
around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that
are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short
interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are
life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If
only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even
a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our
sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments
when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in
shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new
experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems
to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as
paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we
are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything
we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand
in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the
sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added,
has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer
even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We
could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed,
as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps
we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this
way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why
it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the
seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so
much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it
happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open
we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can
enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate;
and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to
other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And
that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will
move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has
long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of
motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate
does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because
so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were
living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was
so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have
entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they
had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a
long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about
the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we
move in infinite space.
How could
it not be difficult for us?
And to
speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this
is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude
ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much
better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this
realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes
used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us,
and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and,
almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great
mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an
abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was
falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a
thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to
catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all
distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of
these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop,
unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all
that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must
accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the
unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of
courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most
unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people
have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the
experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called "spirit
world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have
through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the
senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say
nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the
reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one
human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed
of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where
nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships
to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it
is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we
can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't
exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the
relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the
depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a
larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one
corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they
keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet
how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in
Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be
strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not
prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing
that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the
element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years
of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still,
through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything
around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it
is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses,
these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And
if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us
that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the
most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. 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 us is, in
its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you
mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and
cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must
realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to
shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after
all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you
want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from
and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of
transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is
anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the
means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply
help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since
that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening
now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one
who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor,
who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when
the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are
your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.
Don't
observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what
happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to
look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in
everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of
your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn.
The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so
difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same
time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters
it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names
anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the
nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite
necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble.
And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue
victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have
achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that
there was already something there which you could replace that deception with,
something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a
moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has be come a part of
your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many good
wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the
"great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great
thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult,
but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
And if
there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that
the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple
and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and
sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never
have been able to find those words.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
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