Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 10

This is the final para­graph in the last let­ter that Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus,

Art too is only a way of liv­ing, and, how­ever one lives, one can, unwit­tingly, pre­pare one­self for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neigh­bored than in the unreal half-artistic pro­fes­sions, which, while they pre­tend prox­im­ity to some art, in prac­tice belie and assail the exis­tence of all art, as for instance the whole of jour­nal­ism does and almost all crit­i­cism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called lit­er­a­ture. I am glad, in a word, that you have sur­mounted the dan­ger of falling into this sort of thing and are some­where in a rough real­ity being soli­tary and coura­geous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I sus­pect that most of us with some appre­ci­a­tion towards the arts feel a lit­tle sting in Rilke’s part­ing words. I also sus­pect that Rilke is not inter­ested in crit­i­ciz­ing pro­fes­sions as such but in crit­i­ciz­ing those who “pre­tend prox­im­ity”. Nature, real­ity and truth will not be fooled. Rilke believes that they can be trusted, but this in turn means that they must be trusted. We can­not fool or manip­u­late art and beauty. Prox­im­ity and pres­ence is key both to the for­ma­tion of iden­tity and to the healthy rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. Rilke’s call inward demands that we begin ana­lyz­ing or most pri­mal walls, those inte­rior walls that divide our pas­sions, goals and com­pul­sions. What have we ghet­toized in our self? What is it in us that remains her­met­i­cally sealed? This move­ment is nec­es­sary first because it in turn affects our exter­nal sen­sual real­ity. In greater self-understanding we develop courage and sta­bil­ity to allow our­selves to “pres­ence” real­ity and not pre­tend prox­im­ity. There is no peer review here that can val­i­date our inte­rior and the move­ment is not nat­ural. Much of Rilke’s admon­ish­ing focuses around receiv­ing the dif­fi­cult. This can of course be reduced to pathol­ogy and veiled masochism, but this is not truly dif­fi­cult. The rela­tion­ship between pres­ence and dif­fi­culty is key here. To expe­ri­ence pres­ence we need iden­tify par­tic­u­lar divid­ing walls and either dis­man­tle or at least gate them. Walls, how­ever, are the very essence of our grasp for con­trol and power. To take down a wall is con­trary to the nature indi­vid­ual self-preservation, or at the very least it is an act of trust beyond one’s self. The move­ment of dif­fi­culty is the move­ment of de-centralizing a per­sonal posi­tion of power. This how­ever, is also the move­ment and pos­si­bil­ity of pres­ence, even communion.