Why are my greatest mentors men and women who died long before I was born?
Why is it that a series of ten letters from one Austrian poet to a younger apprentice poet read like the greatest self-help book I’ve ever read?
There is lament in this questions.
I’m lamenting the lack of such powerful guiding lights in today’s cultural climate.
I’m lamenting my inability to connect personally to writers of such stature and such deep understanding of the human condition as Rainer Maria Rilke.
Life Lessons from Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet Review
They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
This happens in your personal relationships (like Misha Thomas who appeared angelically in my life).
This also happens too with books.
Enter a bookstore with a mind full of questions and a heart swollen to bursting and books will leap out at you, like magically animated medicine flying off the apothecary’s shelves.
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet leapt from the shelf right as I wandered in from the Viennese streets having pounded the pavement thinking about change.
And for the rest of the day the book didn’t leave my hands.
The book was clean and pristine when I bought it.
Now it’s dirtied, muddied with my ink, each blot marking a revelation.
So I was never able to sit across from the kindred soul and grand mentor that is Rainer Maria Rilke in the flesh.
At least I have his words.
And, doing them no justice whatsoever, I have decided to note a few of my favourite passages from Letters to a Young Poet in the hopes that you pick up the volume yourself.
All quotes are taken from the Insel Verlag translation by Ulrich Baer. I highly recommend you try to source this translation as it is superb. Also, I’m happy to send the first person to ask my copy. It’s got my notes inside but, if you don’t mind that, it’s yours.
Don’t ask others for advice
You are looking toward the outside, and that above all is the one thing you should not do at this moment. Nobody can give you advice and help you. Nobody. There’s only one way. Go within yourself.
This is a lesson that I’ve come to late in life.
I wasted too much time asking advice from people who had no business giving it.
It’s a truly courageous act to trust yourself.
Trust that you’re the best person to ask advice from when it comes to matters of your own heart.
When we ask others for advice, we’re rarely asking for advice. And when we are we’re rarely ready to act upon it. What we’re typically asking for is validation.
We’re trying to have another convince us that some unpleasant truth isn’t so.
But only when you can honestly take that monkey off your own back and look it straight in the face will the monster shrink in size.
ultimately and especially in the deepest and most important matters we are indescribably alone. For someone to give advice or do as much as to actually help another person a lot has to happen, a lot has to go right, an entire constellation of things has to be aligned for that to occur even once.
We’ve all been helped before.
But I’ll bet you can count the successful, most impactful times someone has helped you on one, maybe two, hands. That’s because they’re so rare, they stand out.
We are completely alone.
When we ask others for advice, we’re rolling the dice in a game with terrible odds.
Don’t gamble. Go within.
Don’t ask others for advice and don’t expect to be understood. Instead, believe in a love that is being safeguarded for you like an inheritance. Have faith that this love will be with you as a force and a blessing while you go very, very far.
This should be the real purpose of religion. A safety net made out of faith.
Imagine if you had complete trust in yourself or in whatever daemon flickers within.
Imagine love was a beautiful object with your name on it and there is a real guard protecting it for you.
How would you act then?
Would you start to trust your own advice?
Or would you continue to defer to others?
How to find your calling:
Substitute the word “write” for whatever you believe your calling is:
Explore the cause that compels you to write; examine whether it plunges its roots into the deepest part of your heart. Admit to yourself whether you would have to die if you were kept from writing. Above all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: ‘do I absolutely have to write?’ Dig within yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is affirmative, if you can counter this grave question with a strong and simple ‘I must’, then build your life according to this need. Even during it’s most indifferent and emptiest hour your life must become a sign and testimony of this urge.
We can turn this into a CBT technique I picked up from Misha.
For the next 5 days, write out the answers, without judgement, to this questions, inserting what you believe your calling is:
- What is the payoff for ___?
- What’s the cost?
- What would it mean to not do it at all?
- What evidence do you have for that?
See what conclusions you come to.
Ultimately, Rilke’s advice is if you cannot go on living without what you believe your calling to be in your life, you must proceed to build your life around it.
I love his emphasis on the fact that even when you’re at your lowest, you must be a sign of this urge.
Even in the deepest pits of depression, a comedian must still write jokes.
Even when grief turns their life upside down, a guitarist will hammer that ax until morning light.
Even when everything around you falls away and turns to shit, a mother will raise her child with all her might.
Rainer Maria Rilke on living and inspiration
If your daily life seems poor and miserable, do not find fault with it. Blame yourself for not being enough of a poet to summon your life’s riches.
I hear a lot of complaints from people. And I’m susceptible to those same complaints.
If you complain about being bored in your day-to-day life or having no meaning, it’s your fault.
Become a poet and uncover the treasure chest buried under this great world.
Bring the gold to the surface.
You are the creator.
Rainer Maria Rilke on art:
A work of art is good when it has been born from necessity.
Clearly a lot more is involved in a good work of art.
And Rilke goes into that (so make sure you pick up the volume for yourself).
We can argue that a lot of shit art has sprung from necessity.
But could you argue that any good art has come from indifference?
Rainer Maria Rilke on creativity:
A creative person has to be a world unto himself, and find everything to which he becomes attached within himself and nature.
The theme that Rilke returns to again and again in the Letters to a Young Poet is this idea of solitude.
It’s the key to everything.
Want to know how to properly love another person?
Go within, be alone, and learn to love yourself.
Want to create great works of art?
Go within, be alone, and learn to love yourself.
Patience is everything
Although you must schedule time for creative work (even the greatest poets write consistently every day, typically at the same time), you must also make peace with the fact that good art needs time to ferment.
To be an artist means not to calculate or count but to grow like a tree which does not force its juices but confidently stands amidst the spring storms without any fear that summer might not arrive. For summer will come.
Have faith that good things are coming.
Surrender to the process.
have patience with everything that has not been resolved in your heart.
You’re filled with unfulfilled questions.
The key to them isn’t answers.
It’s patience.
Accept that life doesn’t always give you closure right away.
Things take however long they take.
Slow down and let them be.
How to experience life:
The artistic way of experiencing life is indeed so incredibly close to sexual experience, to its pain and its pleasure, that both phenomena are actually only different forms of one and the same longing, of one and the same bliss.
You’re good at making love. Now turn that skill onto the wider world.
This is how to live – seduction, bliss, yearning.
Seduce others with your stories, and allow yourself to be seduced by art, food, nature.
Enter a state of bliss, connecting with the fire deep inside, when you listen to music, taste a wonderful dish, or saunter through a forest.
Yearn for the world the way you’d yearn for your lover. Yearn for books, songs, impressions, people, animals, life.
Rainer Marie Rilke on unanswered questions:
Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms of which you lack the key, and books written in a completely foreign tongue. Do not search for answers that cannot be given to you now because you could not live them. And it is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now.
A peace washes over you when you decide to love the questions.
What would you do if you found the answer anyway?
Usually it just begs more questions.
Or you’ll be moderately fulfilled for a short while before another ten questions tug at your heart.
Rilke is telling us what we already know from hackneyed worn-out clichés: it’s all about the journey.
And don’t seek answers to your questions in any way that doesn’t involve living them.
Here are questions that have been weighing unanswered on my mind of late:
- Is love obligation?
- Am I sacrificing enough for my calling?
- Am I even following my correct calling?
You don’t turn to search engines to answer these questions.
You live these questions day-in-day out with every fibre of your being until experience finally intertwines the answer with your soul.
When depressed and looking for guidance:
Rely on nature, on what is so very simple in it, on the tiny things that hardly anyone sees but which can so suddenly become immeasurably great and incommensurate; allow your life to reach even the smallest, most negligible things and try quite humbly as a servant to gain the trust of all that seems poor, paltry, miserable. Then everything will become easier, more coherent and, so to speak, more accommodating and conciliatory for you. Perhaps not for the thinking part of you, which will be left behind in amazement, but your deepest consciousness will awaken and know.
Next time melancholy is banging at your door, go outside and look at a flower.
Bring your thinking-mind with you. It won’t understand, but you can’t leave it behind so easily.
Just try your best to look at the petals, the stem, the pollen.
Look at the smallest possible parts of those things that most ignore and treat them as though they were a holy world unto themselves.
Rainer Maria Rilke on struggling to connect with others:
If you have nothing in common with other people then try to be close to things: they will not abandon you. Then there still are the nights and the winds that pass through the trees and over many lands. And in the world of things and animals, so much happens of which you can be a part. Children are still just the way you yourself had been as a child, so sad and so happy. When you think about your own childhood, you live once more among these lonely children, and once more adults are nothing and their dignity carries no weight.
How often do you hear this as advice for those struggling to make social connections?
This doesn’t mean you abandon society completely.
This is more a method of finding solace in something.
Anyone who has a pet they love (a dog, a cat, a lizard, a rat), knows the feeling of having a terrible day where their coworkers or peers shunned them and then returning home to their pet.
This sounds like sad advice, but really you’re returning to a purer state of childlike wonder.
Watch kids play.
When they don’t have other kids to play with (and even sometimes when they do) you’ll see them making friends with trees, making games with blades of grass, even making a grand drama out of the weather.
When did we stop doing that?
How to live a full life – on the nature of living seriously:
As long as everything that happens is something you absolutely must do, as long as it comes out of a deep urge inside of you, accept this burden without hating anything. Sexuality is burdensome, indeed. But all the tasks we have been given are difficult. Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.
I love that last line.
Let that be your mantra from now on.
No more complaining about things being “difficult”.
How to think clearly in regards to lust, love, and sex:
What is bad is that almost everyone abuses and wastes this experience by turning it into a stimulant for those moments when life gets dull, and as a distraction rather than an opportunity to gather oneself into a higher state. Humans have done the same with food: by thinking of food in terms of either lack of excess, they have obscured the clarity of this need.
You know about Aristotle’s virtues already?
Well, what would be the mean of virtuous sexuality?
For me, it wouldn’t be using sex as an escape from reality.
It also wouldn’t be seeing it as obligation.
They’re the two extremes.
It would be in the middle as an attentive, important, love-charged experience every bit as meaningful as prayer.
Are you thinking clearly?
Or is preoccupation with lack/excess clouding you?
Rainer Maria Rilke on solitude, loneliness, and being alone:
A solitary individual can lay a strong foundation with his own, steadier hands. This, dear Sir, is the reason why you should love your solitude and endure, and even celebrate the pain it causes you. You tell me that those close to you are far away: this means that around you space is beginning to open up.
Most people naturally reject solitude.
There’s a reason why solitary confinement is the most cruel punishment you can inflict upon a human.
But learn to relish solitude.
The pain will forge you.
In the gap you feel between yourself and others is a space for greatness.
You should rejoice in this expansion of yourself; nobody can follow you there.
From this day forward, see solitude as a joyful thing.
Schedule it.
Utilise it as your own private retreat.
Learn to love your own company.
Once you have realised that this loneliness is truly tremendous, you should rejoice in it. For what would really qualify as solitude (ask yourself this question) unless it is something truly great? There is only one kind of solitude, and this solitude is great and not easy to bear. Almost everyone experiences an hour when they would like to trade in being alone for a sense of belonging, no matter how random, threadbare, and cheap, for the illusion of a minor agreement with whatever is nearest and least worthy… but perhaps those are exactly the hours when our solitude grows. For its growth is painful like the coming of age of boys and sad like the beginning of every spring. But this must not distract you. What is needed is nothing but this: solitude, great inner solitude. To go deep into oneself, and during those hours of self-reflection not to encounter anyone – that is what you have to achieve. To be alone, even lonely, in the ways we were alone as children
I can’t pretend to understand that question in the second line on a linguistic level. But something about it hits me right in the core. We understand the sentiment on a visceral level.
Growth is painful.
But go deeper into the pain, the solitude, the quiet.
You’ll emerge stronger.
Don’t let yourself be distracted in your solitude by the fact that something inside of you wishes to escape from it.
I’ve found that if you can brush aside the voice that wishes to escape solitude, the voice disappears to a barely audible whisper, sometimes vanishing completely.
It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult.
Accept this premise: that good things are difficult.
And when we speak of solitude, again it becomes increasingly clear that it is not something that you could either choose or leave. We are alone. You can fool yourself and pretend that it is not so. That is all. But how much better to accept that we are alone, and even to turn that into our premise.
And if all of Rilke’s preceding arguments weren’t persuasive enough, this one should do it.
You are alone and you have no choice otherwise.
Go with the tide. Don’t swim against it.
Rainer Maria Rilke on difficulty:
The fact that something is difficult ought to be one more reason for us to do it.
Why read Infinite Jest? Because it’s difficult.
Why climb Kilimanjaro? Because it’s difficult.
Why live a virtuous life? Because it’s difficult.
Rainer Maria Rilke on loving others:
It is also good to love, for love is difficult. To love another person is perhaps the most difficult task for each of us. It is the most challenging, ultimate test and trial, the supreme work for which all other work is only preparation. That is why young people, who are novices in everything, do not yet know how to love. They have to learn it.
Solitude and love are the most difficult and worthy tasks.
Break-ups confirm love as the most difficult task.
Not just that it ended, but the way it ends and everything that lead up to the end.
But in a break-up is a chance to go back into solitude, reverse-engineer what happened, and learn from it.
Don’t lament the lack of love in your life.
Learn how to love.
Love is a verb.
You learn anything by doing, but especially when it comes to love.
love requires, for extended periods and into the far reaches of life: solitude, intensified and deepened solitude for the one who loves. Love, at first, does not mean anything like abandoning oneself, surrendering or becoming one with another person. (What would be a union of two unresolved, unfinished, and still disorganised beings?) Love is an eminent occasion for an individual to mature and become something in and of himself, to become world, to become world for himself for the sake of another. It is a great and extravagant behest that singles him out and summons him to reach further and become more. When love is given to them, young people should use it only in this sense as the obligation to work on themselves
Love is an obligation to self-improve.
Stop being guilty of throwing yourself completely into your new relationship.
We’ve all done it. We’ve also experienced what it’s like when our friends drop off the face of the earth for some new romantic interest, only to resurface again when it’s over and they’re in a million pieces.
The greatest danger in falling in love with someone is forgetting to love yourself first.
We see this in marriage, where both partners stop doing the things that attracted each other in the first place.
They stop chasing their goals.
They stop exercising and eating right, allowing themselves to grow fat.
They stop becoming interesting, sacrificing the passions they once had for the codependent cocoon of the relationship.
To become oneself in love is the ultimate aim.
When you fall in love, take it as calling to become even better.
Put more into yourself.
And go deeper into solitude.
Here is the serious error that young people so often commit. They hurl themselves at one another when love overcomes them (since it is in their nature not to have patience), and they make themselves completely available, just as they are, in all of their disorder, disarray, confusion… But what is supposed to happen next? What is life supposed to do with this pile of half smashed-up things that they call their commonality and would like to call their happiness and, if that were possible, their future? Everyone loses himself for the sake of another person, but through this process loses that person and many others who wanted to come later.
There’s a saying about what hell is: it’s where on your last day on Earth the person you could have become meets the person you became.
The longer you keep your chaotic unfinished mess of a self fully in a relationship that is likely to crumble sooner or later, the closer you are to that last day on Earth, the day in which you’ll meet who you could have become.
Don’t make yourself completely available in your confused self for the sake of another person.
And question social convention. Question everything that people take as convention when it comes to love.
Ask yourself if your behaviour is dictated or shaped by convention.
Conventions that don’t make sense for every situation, or even the majority of them.
Anything people do in the kind of murky union into which people rush early in life, is conventional. Any kind of relationship resulting from such a state of confusion is compromised, no matter how unconventional it appears on the surface
There is no answer for love and death.
But the more we live life as individuals, by drawing on our solitude, the closer we will get to these great matters.
The constant refrain throughout Rilke’s letters is a cry for us to be the individual.
Those who resist it will never successfully wrestle with the greatest matters in life.
Those who embrace it get closer.
I’ve never asked another advice about how to deal with death.
But each experience I’ve had with mortality has gotten me closer to an understanding on a spiritual rather than cerebral level.
Washing a dead body in preparation for funeral rites brought me closer to the cosmos’ confusing swirl.
Holding my ex’s dog in my arms as she slipped away into another realm taught me more about death than any book or discussion ever could.
If I were asked to render these experiences into words that others could understand, I would find the task impossible.
if we endure and submit to this love as a challenge and an apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the facile and frivolous games which people use to hide from the most serious gravity of their existence, then those who come long after us may perhaps experience a hint of progress and relief.
I love this.
Endure and submit to love as a challenge.
Become an apprentice of love.
And take it seriously.
Don’t flee from important work, difficult tasks, and the burden of living.
It’s only because Rilke himself became an apprentice in this way that I am able to experience relief over a century later.
Rainer Maria Rilke on self-love:
pay close attention to what arises inside of you, and focus on it above anything that you notice outside of yourself. What happens inside of you deserves all of your love. You have to work on this somehow. Don’t lose too much time and too much courage by explaining your position to other people. Who even says that you occupy any position at all?
We judge ourselves way too harshly.
What we need more of is more self-examination and reflection so that we improve and grow, but we must never be harsh with ourselves.
We must treat ourselves with the greatest love.
Rainer Maria Rilke on sadness:
Only those experiences of sadness are dangerous and bad which we share with other people in an effort to drown them out.
The life advice is in the details.
Sadness is not bad.
It’s not dangerous.
It’s valuable and to be prized both in and of its own right but as a vehicle to effect positive change.
We can share our sadness, just like any other emotion, with other people (after all, deep and meaningful discourse is one of life’s greatest joys), but we must not share this emotion with the aim to deaden them.
Use connection as a means to become more alive, more in touch with the strongest stirrings of your soul.
Do not use others to anaesthetise your pain. It’s unfair to them and it’s unfair to you.
Almost all of our sadness, I think, consists of moments of tension that we experience as paralysis because we’ve lost the capacity to experience our own alienated feelings as something alive.
Become alive through sadness.
There are constant challenges in Rilke’s writings:
- Love is your obligation to self-improve.
- Solitude is a powerful necessity for positive change.
- Use your sadness to become more alive.
The problem depressed people have is that they no longer wish to be depressed.
They wish to run, hide, flee from the pain.
I know in my darkest moments, the moments in which I was closest to seriously contemplating the end, all I wanted was for someone to take the pain away.
The only way I was able to push through was to stop trying to hide.
Throwing myself full on into the pain was what got me through.
That is why it is so important to stay alone and to remain attentive when you are sad.
We learn truths through sadness and change and improve.
Rainer Maria Rilke on courage:
Ultimately, the only courage we need is to face boldly the most peculiar, enigmatic, and inexplicable things we may encounter. The fact that people have been cowardly in this regard has done tremendous damage to life.
The damage is not living at all.
it isn’t inertia alone that causes all human affairs to run the same unspeakably monotonous and tedious course from case to case it is also our fearfulness of any new experience whose outcome we don’t know and which we think we cannot master. But only the person who is ready for anything and does not exclude anything from his life, not even the most enigmatic occurrences, will live the relationship with another human being as a part of life, and will truly experience the fullness of his existence.
When was the last time you connected with another human on a deep emotional level?
When was the last time you found yourself swept up in the beauty, sublimity, and grandeur of nature?
When was the last time you got out of your comfort zone and found yourself intuitively understanding a universal truth?
If you can’t pinpoint a time to any of those questions within the last month, you’re probably on autopilot and living a monotonous and tedious existence.
You may even be dead inside.
We have no reason to distrust our world because it is not against us. If it contains frightful things, these frights are our frights, if it contains abysses, these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers we must try to love them.
What a powerful way to live.
Love the things that scare you.
Own them.
They’re your fears, your anxieties, and your avenues to becoming great.
Perhaps all the dragons in our life are princesses who are only waiting for us to be radiant with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is at bottomless helpless, waiting for our help.
Another powerful perspective change.
Shift the paradigms through which you see the difficulties in your life.
Every dragon’s a princess.
Everything terrible is waiting for our help.
Could you imagine if you lived this way for just ten days?
You’d be a god by the end of it.
Rainer Maria Rilke on perspective:
One ought to be extremely careful with names in general. It is often the name of a crime that destroys a life, rather than the nameless and personal action which perhaps responded to a very specific need of that life and could have easily been accommodated by it.
Things are as we name them.
Be careful of labelling as you could damn whatever receives your label.
Rainer Maria Rilke on others:
do not believe that he who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that may occasionally comfort you. His life is full of hardship and sadness and remains far behind you. If it were otherwise, he could have never found these words.
This is Rilke’s beautiful, expert, and humble way of saying he does not have all the answers, and the answers he does have are only by virtue of living through hardship.
It’s tempting to look to others, especially those we respect, and falsely believe they have it easier than us.
If they’re truly worthy of respect it is because they have forged themselves into something great through the fire of painful personal experience.
Rainer Maria Rilke on life:
Believe me: life is always right, without fail.
Let life take its course.
You don’t need to be religious to believe that everything happens for a reason.
But this belief will make you happier.
Don’t quibble whether it’s true or not.
Make it true.
Defer to life as the great teacher who gives you what you need, not necessarily what you want.
You can read more of Rainer Maria Rilke’s life lessons in Letters to a Young Poet here.
Let me know:
What Rainer Maria Rilke quote spoke to you the most?