10 Quotes From Letters To A Young Poet That Will Change Your Life
The words of Rainer Maria Rilke that mean the most to me…
It can be very easy, at times, to be swallowed whole by sadness. Even the things that are seemingly inconsequential can beat down upon us and lay us bare, looking for something—anything—to fill in that eternal empty. I have always regarded this as the primary reason we have such a massive alcohol and drug issue in the US.
Unfortunately, if you’ve ever driven by a methadone clinic in the early morning hours (which I do almost every day) you’ll notice that there aren’t many happy smiles shining back at you. There really is no quick and easy cure for misery. Nor do I think there should be.
The words of Rainer Maria Rilke that pertain to sadness have stuck with me since I first read “Letters To A Young Poet” in college. The idea that we’d do well to trust these periods more than we trust moments of jubilation has always saved me in my moments of despair.
The following are ten quotes from “Letters To A Young Poet” that are meant to be slowly savored and meditated upon. My only hope is that they speak to you with the same calming tone as they possess for me.
The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.
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.
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.
If it were possible for us to see a little further than our knowledge can reach, to see out a little farther over the outworks of our surmising, we should perhaps bear our griefs with greater confidence than our joys.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.”
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.
And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, exposed to so many influences and at the same time removed from any real life context, that if a vice enters into it we must not be too quick to call it a vice.
Thank you for this Billy. I read this over 50 years ago and had forgotten it. I will reread this later from my email to take the time to meditate on each quote.
Letters to a young poet :) I put that by my bed last week. This was a lovely reminder. And your opener, I totally agree.