Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

R. M. Rilke

  THE LETTER FROM THE YOUNG WORKER

  At a gathering last Thursday there was a reading of your poems, Mr V., it haunts me still; the only thing I can think to do is set down for you what is preoccupying me, inasmuch as it is possible for me to do so.

  The day after the reading I found myself by chance at a Christian meeting, and perhaps it was this that really set things off and caused the detonation that has released so much commotion and energy that I am now heading towards you with all my faculties. It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something. I cannot begin. I’m simply jumping over what ought to be the beginning. Nothing is as powerful as silence. Were we not all of us born into talk, it would never have been broken.

  Mr V., I am not speaking of the evening when we heard your poems. I am speaking of the other one. I am driven to say: who – yes, I can find no other way of expressing it now – who then is this Christ who meddles with everything. Who knows nothing about us, nothing about our work, nothing about our needs, nothing about our joys as we achieve, go through and summon them up nowadays – and who nevertheless, it seems, always demands to be the first person in our life. Or are these things just words put in his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, they say. Yes, but among us he comes across as peculiarly at a loss. The conditions he lived in were so very different. Or does it in fact not have much to do with the circumstances – if he came in here, into my room, or visited me out in the factory, would everything immediately be changed, would all be well? Would my heart begin to pound and as it were move up a level and on towards him? My instinct tells me that he cannot come. That it would have no sense. Our world is a different one not just on the outside – it offers him no access. He would not shine through a ready-made coat, it is not true, he would not shine through. It is no coincidence that he went around in a seamless garment, and I believe that the core of light within him, what made him shine so strongly, day and night, has now long been dispersed and distributed differently. But that I think would be the least we could require of him if he was so great, that he somehow come out without remainder, yes, quite without remainder – leaving no trace …

  I cannot imagine that the cross was meant to remain, which after all was only a path, the way of the cross. Certainly it should not be imprinted on us everywhere as if with a branding-iron. It should be dispersed in him himself. For isn’t it like this: he simply wanted to create a taller tree on which we could ripen the better. He, on the cross, is this new tree in God, and we were to be the fruits at the top of it, glad to be in the warm.

  Now we should not always be talking about what went on before but, precisely, the After should have begun. This tree, it seems to me, should have become so one with us, or we with it, we on it, that we ought not always to be occupying ourselves with it but simply and calmly with God, to hold us up more purely in whom was after all its intention.

  When I say God – it is a great conviction in me, not something I have learnt. The whole of creation, as it seems to me, says this word, without deliberation, though often out of deep thoughtfulness. If this man Christ has enabled us to say it with a clearer voice, more roundly, more unassailably, so much the better, but now let’s leave him out of it once and for all. We should not always be forced to fall back into the toil and sorrow that it cost him to ‘redeem’ us, as they put it. Let us finally come into this redemption. – And in other ways too the Old Testament is full as it is of forefingers pointing to God wherever one opens it, and always if someone is weighed down he falls straight into the middle of God. And once I tried to read the Koran. I didn’t get far, but this much I did understand: there is another mighty forefinger, and if you follow it God stands at the end in the midst of his eternal rising, in an orient which will never be exhausted. Christ must have wanted the same. To point. But the people here have been like those dogs who don’t understand pointing and think they are meant to go for the hand. Instead of leaving Christ’s way of the cross, where the signpost was erected to reach far into the night of sacrifice, instead of moving on from this Via Crucis, Christianity has settled there and claims to dwell in Christ there although there was no room in him, not even for his mother, and not for Mary Magdalene – as with anyone who points the way and is a gesture and not a place to stay. – And for this reason they do not dwell in Christ either, the stubborn at heart who are always re-creating him and live from setting crosses which are crooked or have been blown completely over upright again. They have this press of people on their conscience, this queuing up in an overcrowded place, they are to blame that the journey does not continue in the direction of the arms of the cross. They have made a métier of the Christian purpose, a bourgeois occupation, sur place, a pool that is alternately drained and then filled up again. Everything that they do themselves, according to their own insuppressible natures (so far as they are still living beings), stands in contradiction to this curious disposition of theirs, and so they cloud their own waters and continually have to refresh them. They are so zealous they cannot stop making the Here and Now, which we should take pleasure and have trust in, base and worthless – and so more and more they deliver the earth into the hands of those who are prepared to turn it, the failed, suspect earth which is good for nothing better, to temporal, quick profit. This increasing ransacking of life, is it not a consequence of the devaluation of the Here and Now which has been going on for centuries? What madness, to divert us towards a beyond when we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures here. What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high time the impoverished earth called in all the loans that have been made on her felicity to provide for a time that lies beyond the future. Does death really become more transparent by having these light-sources dragged behind it? And isn’t everything that is taken away, given that no void can sustain itself, replaced by deceit and deception – are our cities filled with so much ugly artificial light and noise because true illumination and song have been surrendered to a Jerusalem which will only be entered later? Christ was perhaps right when, in a time of stale and threadbare gods, he spoke ill of the earthly; though (I cannot imagine it otherwise) it amounts to an insult directed at God not to see in what is granted and conceded to us here – so long as we use it correctly – something that fills us with happiness, completely and right to the outer margins of our senses! To make the proper use of things, that’s what it comes down to. To take the Here and Now in one’s hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have: that is at once, to put it rather casually, the gist of God’s great user’s guide, this is what Saint Francis of Assisi meant to record in his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross, whose only purpose in standing there was to point towards the sun. But what goes by the name of the Church had by then swollen into such a clamour of voices that the song of the dying man, drowned out in all quarters, was only caught by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his lovely valley. How many such attempts there have been to produce a reconciliation between Christian denial and the manifest friendliness and good spirits of the earth. But elsewhere too, at the heart of the Church, even at its actual summit, the Here and Now managed to gain its plenitude and its native abundance. Why is the Church not praised for having been sturdy enough not to collapse under the living weight of certain popes, whose thrones were weighed down with bastards, courtesans and corpses? Did they not have more Christianity in them than the dry renovators of the Gospels – that is, Christianity that is living, irrepressible, transformed? What I mean is that we cannot know what will come of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow unabated and not take fright if they suddenly rush into the natural ravines of life and vanish underground and race along unknowable channels.

  I once worked in Marseille for a few months. It was a special time for me, I owe it a great deal. Chance brought me together with a young painter
who remained my friend until his death. He had a sickness of the lungs and was then just back from Tunis. We spent a lot of time together, and as the end of my employment coincided with his return to Paris, we were able to arrange things so as to stay a few days in Avignon. They are days I shall never forget. Partly because of the town itself, its buildings and environs, and also because during those days of uninterrupted and somehow heightened company my friend communicated to me many circumstances of, in particular, his inner life with that eloquence which, it seems, is peculiar to this kind of invalid at certain moments. All that he said had a curious clairvoyant force; through everything that rushed onwards in what were often almost breathless conversations, one could see so to speak the ground, the stones on the bottom … I mean by that: more than just something of our own, nature itself, its oldest and hardest element, which after all we touch upon at so many points and on which we probably depend in our most driven moments, its gradient determining the way we incline. An unexpected and happy love affair also had a part in it, his heart was unusually exalted, for days on end, and as a result the changeful jet of his life shot up to a considerable height. To take in an extraordinary town and a more than pleasant landscape with someone in such a frame of mind is a rare privilege; and when I look back on those tender and at the same time passionate spring days, they appear to me as the only holiday I ever had in my life. The time was so laughably brief, to another it would have sufficed only for a few impressions; to me, not used to spending days of such freedom, it appeared vast. Yes, it almost seems wrong to go on calling time what was more nearly a new state of being free, truly felt as a space, a being-surrounded by openness, no passing or transience. I was catching up on my childhood then, if I can put it that way, and a part of my early youth, all that there had never been time to carry out in my life; I looked, I learned, I understood – and from those days also stems the experience that it is so easy for me, so truthful, so – as my friend would have expressed it – unproblematic, to say ‘God’. How should this dwelling that the popes built for themselves there not strike me as colossal? I had the impression it could contain no interior space at all, but must be piled up of nothing but solid blocks of stone, as if the exiles had no other thought than to heap the weight of the papacy, its overweight, onto the scales of history. And this ecclesiastical palace really does tower up over the ancient torso of a Heracles statue which has been immured in the rocky foundations – ‘Is it not’, said Pierre, ‘as if it had grown from this seed like a gigantic plant?’ – That this should be Christianity, in one of its metamorphoses, would be much easier for me to understand than the idea that one might recognize its strength and its taste in the ever weaker brew of that tisane which, so it is claimed, is prepared from its first and most tender leaves.

  For that spirit which people will have us believe is the authentic Christian one is not embodied in the cathedrals either. I could imagine that beneath some of them there rests the dislodged statue of a Greek goddess; so great a flowering, so much existence has shot up in them, even if, in a fear that first arose in that age, they strove away from that hidden body into the heavens, which the sound of their great bells was intended constantly to hold open.

  After my return from Avignon I often went into churches, in the evenings and on Sundays, alone at first … then later …

  I have a lover, almost a child still; she works at home, which when there is not much work often means that she finds herself in an awkward situation. She is skilful, she’d easily get a job in a factory, but she fears having a patron. Her conception of freedom is limitless. It will not surprise you that she also thinks of God as a kind of patron, even as the ‘arch-patron’ as she told me, laughing, but with such fright in her eyes. It took a long time before she agreed to come with me one evening to St Eustache where I liked going for the music of the May devotions. Once we got as far as Maux together and had a look at gravestones in the church there. Gradually she noticed that God leaves you in peace in churches, that he demands nothing; you could think he wasn’t there at all, n’est-ce pas, but then in the moment you are about to say something of the sort, said Marthe, that even in a church he doesn’t exist, something holds you back. Perhaps only what over so many centuries people themselves have borne into this high, peculiarly fortified air. Or perhaps it is only that the resonance of the sweet and powerful music can never escape completely: yes, it must have penetrated into the stones long ago, and the stones must be strangely moved, these pillars and vaultings, and though stone is hard and difficult of access, even it is shaken in the end by the perpetual singing and these assaults from the organ, these onslaughts, these storms of hymns, every Sunday, these hurricanes on the great feast-days. The calm after a storm. That’s what truly reigns in these old churches. I said so to Marthe. Windless calm. We listened, she got it at once, she has a wonderfully receptive nature. After that we sometimes went in, here and there, when we heard singing, and stood there, close together. Best of all was when we could see a stained-glass window, one of those old ones with many subjects and compartments, each one crammed with figures, big people and little towers and all sorts of goings-on. Nothing was thought to be unfit or too strange; there are castles and battles and a hunt, and the lovely white hart appears again and again amid the warm red and the burning blue. I was once given very old wine to drink. With these windows it is the same for the eyes, except that the wine was only dark red in my mouth – but here the same thing happens in blue and in violet and in green. Everything can be found in the old churches; there is no fear of anything, unlike in the new ones, where so to speak only good examples are present. Here there is also the bad and the wicked, the terrifying; the crippled, the destitute, what is ugly and unjust – and it is as if somehow it were all loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me. In these places I can gather my thoughts and feelings about what it is to be human better than in the street, among people who have absolutely nothing recognizable about them. But that is a difficult thing to say. And what I now want to say is harder still to express. As far as the ‘patron’, as far as power is concerned (this also gradually became clear to me in church, when we were completely taken up by the music), there is only one remedy against it: to go further than it does. Here is what I mean by this: in every power which claims some right over us we should always try to see all power, absolute power, power as such, the power of God. We should say to ourselves, there is only one, and understand power that is lesser, false, defective, as if it were that which takes hold of us legitimately. Would it not thus become harmless? If we always saw in every form of power, including the harmful and malicious, power itself – I mean that which ultimately has the right to be powerful – wouldn’t we then overcome, intact as it were, the illegitimate and the arbitrary? Isn’t our relationship to all the great unknown forces exactly like this? We experience none of them in their purity. We begin by accepting each with its shortcomings, which are perhaps commensurate with our own. – But isn’t it the case with all scholars, explorers and inventors that the assumption that they were dealing with great forces suddenly led to the greatest of all? I am young, and there is much rebelliousness in me; – I cannot be certain that I act in accordance with my judgement in every case, where impatience and bitterness get the better of me; in my innermost being though, I know that subjection leads further than revolt. Subjection puts to shame any kind of usurpation, and in indescribable ways it contributes to the glorification of righteous power. The rebel strains to escape the attraction of a centre of power, and perhaps he will succeed in leaving this force-field; but once outside it he is in a void and has to look around for a new gravitation that will include him. And this usually has even less legitimacy than the first. So why not see at once, in the gravitation we find ourselves in, the supreme power, undeterred by its weaknesses and its fluctuations? Somewhere the arbi
trary will come up against the law of its own accord, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself. Admittedly this belongs to the lengthy, slow processes that stand in utter contradiction with the strange precipitations of our age. But alongside the most rapid movements there will always be slow ones, some indeed of such extreme slowness that we cannot sense their progress at all. But then that is what humanity is here for, is it not, to wait for what extends beyond the individual life. – From that perspective, the slow is often the most rapid of all, that is, it turns out that we only called it slow because is was something we could not measure.

  And there exists, it seems to me, something utterly measureless, which people never tire of laying their hands on by means of standards, surveys, and institutions.

  And it’s here, in the love which, with their intolerable mixture of contempt, concupiscence and curiosity, they call ‘sensual’, that no doubt the worst effects of that debasement are to be sought which Christianity has seen fit to inflict on the earthly. Here everything is disfigurement and repression, although in fact we proceed from this most profound event and in turn possess in it the mid-point of our ecstasies. It is, if I may say so, harder and harder for me to comprehend how a doctrine which puts us in the wrong in the point where the whole of creation enjoys its most blessed right can with such steadfastness, if not actually prove its validity, nevertheless affirm it in all quarters.

  Here too I am thinking of the intense conversations with my dead friend, vouchsafed me in the meadows of the Ile de la Barthelasse in the spring and later. On the very night before his death (he died the following afternoon shortly after five o’clock) he opened for me perspectives of such purity into a region of the blindest suffering that my life seemed to begin again in a thousand places and my voice, when I wanted to answer, deserted me. I did not know that there was such a thing as tears of joy. I wept my first, like a novice, into the hands of Pierre, who would be dead tomorrow, and felt the tide of life rise once more in him and overflow as these warm drops were added to it. Am I being excessive? What I am talking about is an excess, a too-muchness.