165: On Sadness with Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters To a Young Poet (#8)

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Hi everybody. Coming at you today with one of my all time favorite go to passages when things get tough. It comes from one of my favorite books, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. And I actually love this passage so much not only have I sent it to countless friends over the years, I even open Pivot with an excerpt from the letter that I'm going to read you today. A little background on Rilke before I dive in. And I'm I'm reading this version. There are many translations. This version is the translation by MD Herter Norton. Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, the son of a conventional army officer father and a religious fanatical mother who first sent him most unsuitably to military school. After that, largely autodidact, he studied philosophy, history, literature and art in Prague, Munich, and Berlin. From his earliest years he wrote verse. I'm going to read you from letter number eight again. This is the book Letters to a Young Poet. He wrote this letter on August 12, 1904.

I want to talk to you again a while. Dear Mr. Kappas, although I can say almost nothing that is helpful, hardly anything useful. You have had many and great sadnesses which passed, and you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But please consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself, whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being undergone a change while you were satisfied. Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out. Like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated, they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully and accumulate within one. And our life are unlived, spurned, lost life out of which one may die. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown. Our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity. Everything in us withdraws, A stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and. And is silent.

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing. Because we no longer hear our surprised feelings. Living.

Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into ourself. Because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away. Because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain, remains standing. For this reason the sadness too passes. The new thing in us, the added thing has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber, and is not even there anymore, is already in our blood, and we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened. And yet we have changed as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come. Perhaps we shall never know. But many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad. Because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us. As if from outside.

The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad. So much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us. So much the better do we make it ours. So much the more will it be our destiny. And when on some later day it happens that is, steps forth out of us to others, we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary. And toward this our development will move gradually that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion. We will also gradually learn to realize that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without, into them only because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them? It was so strange to them that in their bewildered fright they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never to before have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come.

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappas. But we move in infinite space.

How should it not be difficult for us.

And to speak of solitude again? It becomes always clearer that this is, at bottom, not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better is it to realize that we are so? Yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then, for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us. There is nothing near any more, and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort. An unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling, or hurled out into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces. What a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses.

So for him who becomes solitary, all distances, all measures change. Of these changes, many take place suddenly. And then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing.

But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. That is, at the bottom, the only courage that is demanded of us. To have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has, in this sense been cowardly and has done life endless harm. The experiences that are called visions, the whole so called spirit world, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us have, by daily parrying, been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied, to say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual. The relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed. It is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human, which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond. And over and above this we have been through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life that when we hold still, we are though a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors? They are our terrors. Has it abysses? Those abysses belong to us. Our dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples? The myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappas, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen, if a restiveness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all you do, you must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand, it will not let you fall.

Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with a question whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound, since you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change, if there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter. So one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress.

In you, dear Mr. Kappas, so much is now happening. You must be patient as a sick man and confident as a convalescent, for perhaps you are both. And more, you are the doctor, too, which has to watch over himself. But there are in every illness many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And this is that you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now, above all do.

Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you. Let it simply happen to you. Otherwise you will too easily look with reproach, that is morally upon your past, which naturally has its share in all that you are now meeting, but that part of the errors, desires, and longings of your boyhood which is working in you is not what you remember and condemn. The usual conditions of a lonely and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, open to so many influences, and at the same time so disengaged from all real connections with life, that where vice enters into it, one may not, without more ado, simply call it vice. One must be so careful with names anyway. It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life, and would have been absorbed by it without effort.

And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory. It is not the victory that is the great thing you think to have done, although you are right in your feeling. The great thing is that there was already something there which you could put in the place of that delusion, something true and real. Without this, even your victory would have been but a moral reaction without wide significance. But thus it has become a segment of your life.

Your life, dear Mr. Capus, of which, I think, with so many wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of its childhood for the great.

I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult. But for this reason too, it will not cease to grow.

And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this.

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness, and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always sa.