Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 8

With respect to our place in the future Rilke says,

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kap­pus, but we move in infi­nite space.

In an attempt to get my own head around Rilke’s thought in the fol­low­ing para­graphs I will quote in full with per­haps some brief com­ments clar­i­fy­ing what I am focus­ing on or perceiving.

And to speak of soli­tude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bot­tom not some­thing that one can take or leave. We are soli­tary. We may delude our­selves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much bet­ter it is to real­ize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assum­ing it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accus­tomed to rest are taken from us, there is noth­ing near any more and every­thing far is infi­nitely far. A per­son removed from his own room, almost with­out prepa­ra­tion and tran­si­tion, and set upon the height of a great moun­tain range, would feel some­thing of the sort: an unpar­al­leled inse­cu­rity, an aban­don­ment to some­thing inex­press­ible would almost anni­hi­late him. He would think him­self falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thou­sand pieces: what a mon­strous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

Why is it that the move­ment towards the soli­tary is so dis­ori­en­tat­ing? I have writ­ten else­where that I can­not con­ceive of a non-relational real­ity, which seems to make this idea of pri­mal soli­tude a prob­lem.  While that may be true I won­der if what Rilke is get­ting at is that our notion of con­nec­tion or rela­tion­ship is more often the con­nec­tion to our­selves which we see in oth­ers. We love in oth­ers what we love in our­selves and there­fore do not love oth­ers at all.  We hate (or cre­ate) in oth­ers what we also hate. We are dis­ori­en­tated in soli­tude because we have lost the self-perceived affir­ma­tion we find in others.

So for him who becomes soli­tary all dis­tances, all mea­sures change; of these changes many take place sud­denly, and then, as with the man on the moun­tain­top, extra­or­di­nary imag­in­ings and sin­gu­lar sen­sa­tions arise that seem to grow out beyond all bear­ing. But is nec­es­sary for us to expe­ri­ence that too. We must assume our exis­tence as broadly as we in any way can; every­thing, even the unheard-of, must be pos­si­ble in it.

This is where my sense of Rilke’s tran­scen­dence emerges. By tran­scen­dence I mean open­ness.

That is at bot­tom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most sin­gu­lar and the most inex­plic­a­ble that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cow­ardly has done life end­less harm; the expe­ri­ences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily par­ry­ing been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atro­phied. [empha­sis mine]

Then he writes this in con­nec­tion to human relationships.

For it is not iner­tia alone that is respon­si­ble for human rela­tion­ships repeat­ing them­selves from case to case, inde­scrib­ably monot­o­nous and unre­newed; it is shy­ness before any sort of new, unfore­see­able expe­ri­ence with which one does not think one­self able to cope. But only some­one who is ready for every­thing, who excludes noth­ing, not even the most enig­mat­i­cal, will live the rela­tion to another as some­thing alive and will him­self draw exhaus­tively from his own expe­ri­ence.  [empha­sis mine]

Rilke goes on to encour­age Mr. Kap­pus to explore the con­tours of his world crit­i­ciz­ing human­ity for becom­ing to accom­mo­dat­ing to their envi­ron­ment. He continues,

We have no rea­son to mis­trust our world, for it is not against us. Has it ter­rors, they are our ter­rors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dan­gers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life accord­ing to that prin­ci­ple which coun­sels us that we must always hold to the dif­fi­cult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faith­ful. How should we be able to for­get those ancient myths that are at the begin­ning of all peo­ples, the myths about drag­ons that at the last moment turn into princesses; per­haps all the drag­ons of our lives are princesses who are only wait­ing to see us beau­ti­ful and brave. Per­haps every­thing ter­ri­ble is in its deep­est being some­thing help­less that wants help from us.

Far from being an attempt to view the world through rose col­ored glasses Rilke here advo­cates a “nar­row path” rec­og­niz­ing that we can­not trust the smooth and the easy. This path is both unsta­ble and promises no fruit. Rather, this per­spec­tive opens wide the embrace of ter­ror and abyss with the knowl­edge that they are not embed­ded or foun­da­tional in the cre­ated order. They too will be dis­solved or as Rilke sees it trans­formed as we approach them in beauty and bravery.