What a great book this was for a young poet like myself. I find that there is consistency among the worldviews of artists. Examples of this consistency include a devotion to solitude and a belief that happiness is somehow incompatible with making art—both of these were espoused by Rilke in this book.
I had honestly not heard of Rilke until this book was recommended to me by an artist whom I met while walking in the woods a few weeks ago. The general premise of this book is that Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet at a military academy in Austria, writes to Rilke to seek advice. Kappus asks Rilke’s opinion of his own poetry and also how he should decide between pursuing poetry or a career in the military. There are ten letters in total. The correspondence lasted from 1902 to 1908.
As for myself, I still feel uneasy when I write about writing. It gives me a sense of blowing my own horn. But I enjoy it when other writers do it, the same as I would enjoy talking to a friend with whom I share an occupation.
In this review, I want to organize some of Rilke’s writing from this book into four themes, summarize what I understand to be Rilke’s main points, and then respond with my own commentary. Those four themes are identity, sex, gender, and love.
1. IDENTITY
“You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer.”
I once had this thought that if you would do nothing else but be yourself, then you could not fail. We are trained to look outwards, to look at others and seek advice. This is the main method of learning we are taught in school. Rilke is talking here specifically about writing, but I believe it applies to all endeavors. I believe being yourself is the key to success because of consistency. If you try to be someone else, to imitate, you will eventually lose the desire to be that other person. Then you will search for someone else to be, on and on. This way, you become a confused mixture of others, and not even the others truly, only imitations of them. This way, you stay shallow, jumping like a frog on the surface from one lily pad to the next. You can go deeper into yourself than anyone else. Your depths are boundless. If we think about Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, it is easier to achieve this by being yourself. If you try to imitate someone else, you can only read the books they have written or talk to them in the time they spend with you. With yourself, you can read about yourself and never run out of pages. You can talk to yourself and never run out of things to say. Also, you are always yourself, so you have a better chance of getting to the 10,000 hours. If you are imitating another, then you might switch to imitating someone else before you get to 10,000.
On the other hand, are you really yourself? Or are you inevitably the product of nature and nurture, your biology and the society around you? If you “go inside yourself,” as Rilke instructs, what will you find there? Will you find someone or something that is in some way truly yourself? Or will you find something else? Even if you will not find yourself, perhaps going through yourself is the way to find what you are looking for.
“Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your own everyday life affords … “
Viewed as advice to a writer, I understand the “common themes” to be the themes about which a writer is ordinarily expected to write, e.g., a novel about war or poetry about love. Rilke is telling Kappus to focus, instead, on the themes of his “everyday life.”
This resonates for me because, when I observe my own life, and especially when I am looking for something to write about, I find that my life is rather boring. When I find my life thus, I usually have one of two thoughts. First, I think to change my life. I think I should go on a daring trip across the country like Kerouac. Second, I think to write fiction. I think I should write about something other than my life because it’s not interesting enough the way it is.
” … use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.”
Ha! This is such a perfect response to what I just wrote in my previous bit of commentary. Rilke speaks from the grave still, as if he were here having a conversation with me. He says, “Accuse yourself!”
Of course, my life, as well as each and every other life, is fertile soil for the growth of great writing. What battles are fought within the mind of a man who plays chess in the park? What perverted and forbidden love wells in the heart of a pedophile, like Humbert Humbert in Lolita?
Moving forward, when I look at my surroundings and find nothing worth writing, I should not blame my surroundings. Rather, I should blame myself for not seeing the beauty that is always there. This is an important practice both in writing and in life.
Beyond being helpful for my writing, I truly believe this. There is beauty everywhere and always, even in the smallest occurrences. There is also humor, sadness, ecstasy, triumph, loss, and all the other grand human emotions. And they can be found in moments as simple as the faucet dripping or the leaf of the house plant bobbing in the breeze coming through the open window.
“Why do you want to exclude any disturbance, any pain, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what these conditions are working upon you?”
This reminds me of a story I read in A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Basically, a guy wins a car in a lottery. People congratulate him and say, “You are so lucky!” He says, “Maybe.” Then one day he gets in a car crash. Someone says, “That was unfortunate.” He says, “Maybe.” While he’s in the hospital, a landslide destroys his house but he’s safe because he’s in the hospital, and in some way or another he says “maybe” again.
The point is: we don’t know if any event will turn out to be truly good or bad. We are often very immediate in how we judge things to be good or bad. For example, breaking up with your partner might seem bad at first, but then maybe you’ll go on an incredible journey with your newfound freedom.
“Do not observe yourself too closely. Do not draw too rapid conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.”
I find this advice, viewed in a certain way, to contradict what Rilke previously mentioned, “This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer.”
If I am a writer, might I just let it happen to me? Rather than searching too seriously for the cause of my being a writer in the first place?
2. SEX
” … artistic experience really lies so incredibly close to sexual, to its agony and its ecstasy, that both phenomena are actually only different forms of one and the same longing and felicity … “
I have personally found this to be true. I have practiced a form of writing that is done by speaking my unfiltered mind aloud into a recorder. When writing this way, I felt the practice of writing to be most like the sexual experience. Though I’m not sure if I could pinpoint why exactly they are similar. Perhaps they are both acts of creation. Rilke and I both being males, I wonder if female artists would agree with us. Perhaps the artistic experience is closer to the male sexual experience—to give of oneself to another and, in doing so, create. Who is the “other” in the encounter. In sex, it is a sexual partner. In art, the artist’s relationship with their reader, viewer, listener is often a mystery. The artist does not often create with their consumer there in the room with them. How then does the artist form a relationship with their reader, viewer, listener, and is it a sexual relationship in some ways?
” … contrive, yourself, out of your own disposition and nature, out of your experience and childhood and strength to achieve an entirely individual relationship to sex (not influenced by convention and custom), then you need no longer fear to lose yourself and become unworthy of your best possession.”
First, I think Rilke is referring to one’s sexuality when he writes “best possession.” If I recall, Kappus (the other correspondent) must have expressed something like a feeling of becoming unworthy of his sexuality. In any case, the first part of this excerpt is where I want to focus. How does one achieve an “entirely individual relationship to sex?” Rilke seems to think one should start by ignoring one’s disposition, nature, experience, and childhood. These may be perilous words of advice to a person who has an inclination to sexual perversion. For example, I am currently reading Lolita. I can imagine how Humbert Humbert might twist Rilke’s words in order to justify his relationship with young Dolores Haze. After all, sex is usually not an individual undertaking. While one may come to the sexual encounter with their own “individual relationship to sex,” at the point of involving another, there are now the beginnings of society and agreement. On the other hand, do certain societies establish customs and laws which are excessive in the moderation of the sexuality of their individual members?
” … want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple necessities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull.”
“Simple necessities” include more than just sex. Rilke is also talking about hunger, thirst, need for shelter, need for sleep. If I recall, I believe his point is that the superfluity made possible by our modern times has made the satisfaction of these necessities dull. No longer do we have to hunt to eat lunch. We can just walk down to the deli. No longer do we have to keep watch at the mouth of the cave. We can just lock our doors in our already safe neighborhoods. The “clarity” of the need has, therefore, become dull. Similar to how the first drink of wine is the most intelligible. After the first few sips, we are drinking just to finish the glass, just because it is there on the table and easily available to us. Our minds and bodies are evolutionarily equipped with the abilities to satisfy certain needs in order to be healthy. What happens when those needs are automatically satisfied? What then are we to do with our abilities?
“There it sees no entirely mature and unmixed sex world, but one which is not human enough, merely masculine, which is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and loaded with the old prejudices and arrogances with which men have disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.”
“Because he loves only as man, not as human being … ” How does one love as a human being? Is Rilke’s view of masculine sexuality overly critical in this passage? Anything can be thought of as either good or bad. Thinking of masculine sexuality as good, we might say that is forthright, strong, charitable, and creative. Rilke seems to take the perspective of viewing it as bad here. Alas, my own mind may have not delved deeply enough into this particular passage. Still, I found it worthy of inclusion on its own merits.
3. GENDER
“And perhaps the sexes are more akin than we suppose, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maiden, freed from all false feelings and perversions, will seek each other not as opposites … “
Gender is a scale, not binary, is something I’ve heard a lot recently. In what way are the sexes akin? Not biologically, this is plain. But then again, men and women have far more biological similarities than they have differences. And there is certainly great overlap between men and women emotionally and intellectually. Perhaps males can, at times, exhibit feminine qualities, and females can, at times, exhibit masculine qualities. Between man and woman, we are much more alike in our humanness than we are different in our gender.
“The girl and the woman in their new, individual unfolding will be only transient imitators of bad or good masculine behaviour, and repeaters of masculine professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions it will be seen that women have passed through the exuberance and vicissitudes of those (often ridiculous) disguises, only in order to purify their most essential being from the distorting influences of the other sex.”
We live in a world constructed by men, in which the way to get ahead is to be like a man. Is it any surprise when women imitate men in order to achieve success, say, in the workplace? Rilke seems to think that women are not living as their “most essential being(s).” What activities and qualities are most essentially womanly? Why are these activities and qualities not prevalent in our modern society such that women are forced to pretend to be men? What needs to happen for these activities and qualities to be established in society such that women feel that they have space to rise up as their “most essential being(s)?”
4. LOVE
“But that is where young people so often and so grievously go wrong: that they (whose nature it is to have no patience) throw themselves at each other when love comes over them, scatter themselves abroad, just as they are in all their untidiness, disorder and confusion … “
Young people fall in love when they are still not ready, when they are still untidy, disordered, and confused. There is no entrance exam for love. There are practically no requirements other than someone else loving you back. It is easy to fall in love. I daresay it’s even difficult not to. It is one of our most natural instincts. It is much more difficult to resist until one is ready. But perhaps one is never fully ready. So at some point you have to start loving and learn how to communicate effectively with your lover when you are an inadequate lover.
” … love falsely, that is simply surrendering, letting solitude go … “
According to Rilke, loving “falsely” is “surrendering.” And what he means by “surrendering” is “letting solitude go.”
“The claims which the difficult work of love lays upon our development are more than life-sized, and as beginners we are not equal to them. But if we continue to hold out and take this love upon ourselves as a burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play behind which mankind have concealed themselves from the most serious gravity of their existence,—then perhaps some small progress and some alleviation will become perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.”
Rilke says love is “the most serious gravity of mankind.” He seems to think that we can make some sort of progress in love that can be passed on from generation to generation, seemingly in the same way that we have passed on advances in science, for example. Rilke seems to think we make no progress because of “the light and frivolous play behind which mankind have concealed themselves.” What does he mean by “light and frivolous play?” Perhaps it is because love is left to each individual with only a lifetime to figure out an eternal complexity. As individuals, we are like ignorant children, when it comes to love. We approach it with a playful attitude. What would Rilke suggest instead? Is it possible for us to study, practice, and improve upon our loving abilities and then pass that knowledge and skill on to the next generation? What we pass on from one generation to the next in regards to love is mostly custom and law. The Kama Sutra has some instructions aimed at the betterment of love, but it also contains a good deal of decorum and rules if I recall correctly.
” … a relationship meant to be between one human being and another, no longer between man and wife. And this more human love … “
Can man be wife and wife be man? Does a “more human love” include homosexual love? Does Rilke mean more to say that man and wife should rise up out of their gender identities in order to engage in this “more human love?” Or does he mean specifically to include love between a man and a man or a woman and a woman?
Source: Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Start Publishing LLC, 2012.