This month’s book recommendation is something that has been on my radar for years and I’ve always had a ‘yeah, yeah, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet – that’s got all sorts of insights into being an artist. I know I should read it, but…’ attitude towards it. Which, of course, was stupid. And I (wrongly) assumed it was quite long. So when it was recommended, again, by a newsletter I love and trust completely I was compelled (in the spirit of doing stuff now and not putting it off) to go out and buy a copy. And blow me if it isn’t a tiny wee slip of a book (52 pages) and this edition cost a whopping £1. That’s right, people, £1. There are NO MORE EXCUSES for you not to read this!
Now, this isn’t a life-changing book, because what writing can live up to the hype? But it is full of interesting ideas on living a creative life, and insights into the mind of a formidable creative force, and that’s really all I need on a grey autumn day when I don’t have a lot of energy to be focused and concentrate.
In this short collection of letters sent by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to an aspiring young poet in the early 20th Century, Rilke offers all sorts of advice about leading an artistic life and being a poet. Sometimes it’s very specific (how to use irony and which books to read) but mostly it’s nice and general and therefore relevant to us all. Snippets of advice I particularly like are:
To trust your instincts
“To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.”
To be patient
“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. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thanks for: patience is all!”
On those big questions & unknowns
“…be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
That last one in particular. How quick we are to try to think our way out of problems or to answer questions. How often do we just let them be and allow the answers to unfold through the act of living?
And, around all the small gems of wisdom, Rilke returns to some themes over and over throughout the ten letters. Themes of solitude, love and sadness. These sections, where he shares so much of his own opinion and experience, really do feel like a torch-beam into his creative life, where his creativity came from. And, whereas many people might resist prescribing solitude as a mode for life that is positive, Rilke points out that solitude “will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need.” The benefit of solitude being that it cultivates your inner world, and this is where ideas and poetry comes from. Even sadness can be seen as a force for good for the poet – “Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?”. It is this openness to experience everything, the good and the bad, which is at the heart of Rilke’s advice: “Only someone who is ready for anything and rules nothing out, not even the most enigmatic things, will experience the relationship with another as a living thing and will himself live his own existence to the full.”
And, finally, to end with advice that Rilke gives from the off, that in reality no one can give you any advice for creative acts. That the only way to understand your creativity and your impulse to create is to look within:
“You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether if reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied to you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to his necessity… Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.”
Dare you ask yourself these questions ‘in your night’s quietest hour’? Do we have the courage to live a creative life without ‘asking after the rewards that may come from outside’? This is a thought-provoking book, with some challenging opinions. Why not slip it in your reading pile and see what happens?
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke. Penguin Classics
Books to inspire: Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet
