Letter Eight
Borgeby
gard,
I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that
will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which
passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you.
But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses
haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been
transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone
important changes while you were sad. 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; like diseases that are treated
superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval
break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are
life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were
possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond
the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses
with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when
something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy
embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new
experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses
are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear
our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar
presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is
for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition
where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new
presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,
has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already
in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to
believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest
has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but
many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed
in us, long before it happens. 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. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence
can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate;
and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to
other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And
that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will
move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has
long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of
motion; and they ill also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does
not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so
many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were
living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was
so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it
was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear,
they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of
it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.
Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they
are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands
still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite
space.
How could it not be difficult for us?
And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and
clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from.
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not
true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize
that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of
course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken
away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is
infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or
transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel
something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless,
would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being
catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal
lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the
situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for
the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then,
as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings
arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary
for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we
possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage
to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can
meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done
infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions,"
the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are
so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely
pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp
them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the
fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the
individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and
another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite
possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing
happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be
repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is
timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can
deal with. but only someone who is ready for
everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,
will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will
himself sound the depths of his own being. for if we
imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious
that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the
window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way
they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous
insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes
of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of
their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set
around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been
put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover,
through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly
that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be
differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any
mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they
are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are
dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in
accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the
difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most
intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that
stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last
moment are transformed into princesses? 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.
So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus,
if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an
anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over
everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that
life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you
fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any
depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing
inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where
all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that
you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to
change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind
that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is
alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to
break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like
someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is
recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who
has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the
doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your
own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.
Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to
draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it
will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past,
which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever
errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary
circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so
complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off
from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not
simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often
the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal
action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and
could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of
energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the
"great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are
right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something
there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real.
Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no
great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think
of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out
of childhood toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning
forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not
cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is
this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives
untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you much
pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours.
If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke