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December 5
Rome
December 23, 1903
My dear Mr. Kappus,
I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas
comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing
your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice
that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should
ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there
is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to
bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange
it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap,
for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who
comes along, the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps these are
the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing
is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning
of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary,
after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To
walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what
you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when
you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved
with matters that seemed large and important because they
looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about
what they were doing.
And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that
their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with
life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child
would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out
of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and
status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's
wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn,
since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone,
whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely
what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you,
and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering
of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your
own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and
place that above everything you perceive around you. What
is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire
love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose
too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude
toward people. Who says that you have any attitude at all?
- I know, your profession is hard and full of things that
contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it
would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say
to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions
are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility
toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred
of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid
duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily
burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than
all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend
to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless note that
is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important
Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the
individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws
like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or
looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels
what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if
from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life.
What you, dear Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer,
you would have felt in just the same way in any of the established
professions; yes, even if, outside any position, you had simply
tried to find some easy and independent contact with society,
this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared
you. - It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for
anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with
other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon
you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move
through the trees and across many lands; everything in the
world of Things and animals is still filled with happening,
which you can take part in; and children are still the way
you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way -
and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among
them, and the grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has
no value.
And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood
and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because
you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere,
when ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really
lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet
possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think
that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with
great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose
that someone who really has him could lose him like a little
stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could
only be lost by him? - But if you realize that he did not
exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if
you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad
deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that
even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are
talking about him - what justifies you then, if he never existed,
in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching
for him as though he were lost?
Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who
has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday
arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?
What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that
are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful
and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't
you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning,
and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting
is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must
not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose
himself out of fullness and superabundance? - Must not he
be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself,
and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for
has already existed?
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out
of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the
insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin,
with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a
silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that
we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him
whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could
not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago,
still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate,
as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the
depths of time.
Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in
this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest,
the outermost limit?
Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling,
that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order
to being; these very days of your transition are perhaps the
time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once
worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient
and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can
do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for
Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.
And be glad and confident.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
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