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A review by e333mily
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
5.0
Reviewed 12 December 2022:
Returned to my favourite, in time for the new year, but found myself unable to enter into the pages as I usually do. Got really worried—have I read this too many times?—but then realised Rilke would be rolling his eyes at me. I am a different person every time I read this book, so the book itself always feels slightly different; I am drawn to different passages, and sentences I merely glazed over in my last reading take on a new significance.
I have underlined practically all of this book, in different coloured pens, each year. It feels like a time capsule—I can see what words 19 year old Emily needed to hear, underlined and starred in black pen; and 21 year old Emily, frantic and in red pen. I used a blue pen this time and will eventually run out of colours, I think.
And of course, the words I needed this year:
“Your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you.”
“Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
“Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.”
Reviewed 12 August 2021:
I am feeling a lot of things tonight so I returned to my old friend Rilke. I love how tenderly he writes to Kappus, it all feels so warm and personal. This is truly the one book I think I could read again and again and again, and never grow tired of it, and always find something new in it.
The words I needed tonight:
“Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help. So dear Mr Kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before…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.”
And, of course:
“You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves…”
Reviewed 31 December 2019:
I was going through a box where I keep old notes and postcards, and I found this book, half-read and full of old receipts and a ticket from the Met Breuer.
I’ve read pieces of it here and there, but never finished it. Which is odd, because I know it contains one of my favourite ever quotes. One I stumbled upon on tumblr (yes, that long ago). “Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves...”
Rilke always feels like an old friend, and I’m really glad he was my last read of the decade. I feel like this is one of those books I need to keep returning to, until all of the lines live within me.
“To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious...to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist...
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come.”
Returned to my favourite, in time for the new year, but found myself unable to enter into the pages as I usually do. Got really worried—have I read this too many times?—but then realised Rilke would be rolling his eyes at me. I am a different person every time I read this book, so the book itself always feels slightly different; I am drawn to different passages, and sentences I merely glazed over in my last reading take on a new significance.
I have underlined practically all of this book, in different coloured pens, each year. It feels like a time capsule—I can see what words 19 year old Emily needed to hear, underlined and starred in black pen; and 21 year old Emily, frantic and in red pen. I used a blue pen this time and will eventually run out of colours, I think.
And of course, the words I needed this year:
“Your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you.”
“Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
“Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.”
Reviewed 12 August 2021:
I am feeling a lot of things tonight so I returned to my old friend Rilke. I love how tenderly he writes to Kappus, it all feels so warm and personal. This is truly the one book I think I could read again and again and again, and never grow tired of it, and always find something new in it.
The words I needed tonight:
“Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help. So dear Mr Kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before…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.”
And, of course:
“You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves…”
Reviewed 31 December 2019:
I was going through a box where I keep old notes and postcards, and I found this book, half-read and full of old receipts and a ticket from the Met Breuer.
I’ve read pieces of it here and there, but never finished it. Which is odd, because I know it contains one of my favourite ever quotes. One I stumbled upon on tumblr (yes, that long ago). “Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves...”
Rilke always feels like an old friend, and I’m really glad he was my last read of the decade. I feel like this is one of those books I need to keep returning to, until all of the lines live within me.
“To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious...to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist...
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come.”