Letter Six
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