Letters on Life

INTRODUCTION
 
 
Ulrich Baer
 
But to have been
once, even though only once:
this having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal.
 
 
All that we
can achieve here, is to recognize ourselves completely
in what can be seen on earth.
 
 
DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)
 
 
Every morning the poet sat down at his desk to work. Everything had been carefully prepared: he had dressed in shirt, tie, and a dark tailored suit; eaten breakfast at the table (whenever possible, there was real silver and heavy linen); sipped his good coffee; and kept most of his language to himself, expending it only to address his discreet housekeeper with a brief comment about the weather or how the cut flowers were nicely holding up. Now he faced the two pens before him. One pen was reserved for work— the few volumes of poems that he had published and the single novel that had won him some acclaim—while the other was the pen for dispensing with bills, requests, and letters, the sort of things that required words and language but did not qualify, as far as the reading public or his own exacting self were concerned, as poetic “work.” He had adopted a maxim early in life, during one of his apprenticeships with an older artist whose exemplary focus had been an inspiration: “One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.” On several occasions, he had cited this maxim in print and had even authored a short book on the artist’s work and life. But, in truth, it had not been easy for him to understand how a person could so uncompromisingly privilege work above all else. Alas, how to live according to this mantra, which extolled the sanctification of work, proved even harder. Nothing but work. Every morning, face nothing but yourself, be truly alone, and choose between the two pens that could channel the production of the day. There was the desk, carefully placed in the center of the room and lovingly covered with a silk scarf lent by a wealthy friend; there were the flowers sent by the same friend and arranged in a round white vase; there was one stack of expensive “work” paper and another one of equally expensive (really quite indulgent) stationery. Everything was set, he was dressed the part, and now it was only a matter of setting pen to paper and then “nothing but work.” But Rilke knew that his maxim was starting to sound as hollow as most daily prayers, and he knew even more acutely that all his trappings were nothing but a disguise, a masquerade to cover up the self-indulgent urge to get up and walk somewhere, go back to bed, to check on the mail or on the roses, to give in to temptation and take a walk, take a call, take a break. Just as he was about to rise from his chair, ready to lose this morning’s battle that lasted but seconds and yet tore at his soul, his eyes fell on the small book listing his correspondence. Every letter he received was entered there with name and date, and those to whom he had responded were crossed off.
 
He would write letter after letter, several of them running up to eight pages in length. The next thing that happened was the housekeeper’s gentle tapping on the door. It was lunchtime. A stack of neatly addressed envelopes had risen on the table, and more than two dozen names had been crossed off “the certain little list” in the small book. Had he worked? Which pen had been picked up? For several hours, language had coursed through him as if it were oil or wax that becomes more pliant when subjected to movement and heat. His pen had yielded what he called “the juice”: a few of the letters were personal, playful, brimming with witty images, self-mocking asides and details of his everyday life; others barely contained a proper greeting before unfolding an extended and precise reflection on a particular question or problem. Throughout the morning, Rilke had conversed intimately with a series of individuals, ever so slightly inflecting his voice for each of them. In the process of writing his letters, he had advanced not only his thinking but also his language. Since these were letters destined to leave him within hours, however, they served a different function from the journal, diary, and notebooks he kept to jot down drafts and ideas as potential seeds for longer poems. The letters became the rehearsal space of which Rilke lifted the curtain on his creative process just enough to fend off the sense of isolation that threatened to undermine his hard-won and cherished solitude. “In addition to my voice which points beyond me,” he writes in a letter of January 24, 1920, “there is still the sound of that small longing which originates in my solitude and which I have not entirely mastered, a whistling-woeful tone that blows through a crack in this leaky solitude—, it calls out, alas, and summons others to me!” The work pen had not been touched, no poem had been born, and a few of the sheets reserved only for verse had even been conscripted when the stationery had run out. Pages and pages had been filled. And although Rilke sent these letters out, he had amassed and saved for others the wealth of expressed ideas, striking images, and verbalized thoughts that he would later distill into the denser shapes of his poetic work.
 
Rainer Maria Rilke’s work has captured the imagination of musicians, philosophers, artists, writers, and poetry lovers, and it has extended the reach of poetry to people rarely concerned with human utterances cast in verse. Marlene Dietrich, Martin Heidegger, and Warren Zevon all recited Rilke poems by heart. This capacity of Rilke’s words to touch such different people as if each word had been written just for them, aside from his esteem among fellow poets and academics, lends his poetry its force and has saved his work from becoming simply an artifact of the civilization that Hegel first called Old Europe. The power of Rilke’s writings results from his capacity to interlock the description of everyday objects, minute feelings, small gestures, and overlooked things— that which makes up the world for each of us—with transcendent themes. By interlocking the everyday and the transcendent, Rilke suggests in his poetry, and minutely explains in his letters, that the key to the secrets of our existence might be found right in front of our eyes. This suggestion is not solely the province of Rilke’s poetry, which amounts to eleven collections published before his death in 1926 and a large number of posthumously published poems. He was a prodigious letter writer, and in his astoundingly vast correspondence Rilke let go of the constraints of German verse to produce powerful and accessible reflections on a vast range of topics.
 
Treat this book like a user’s manual for life: open it anywhere, if what you need right now is the grounding for your experience that seems lacking during especially trying or exhilarating periods of our lives. Or use The Poet’s Guide to Life as an adaptable resource for the moments in life when something meaningful deserves to be said. For good reason, the relatively scant number of Rilke’s words so far available in English have already become perennial favorites at weddings and graduation ceremonies, and they are placed on the walls of hospitals and nursery schools. Rilke possessed the uncanny ability to phrase the most profound experiences and emotions with great precision and without detaching them from the lived reality in which they arise or to which they respond. This book contains these words, which Rilke intended to be used in and for life. He did not want his writing to be put under glass like orchids made of silk but instead hoped it would be read irreverently, spoken not only by professional custodians of high culture, but breathed deeply into the messiness of life that no one can avoid.
 
Rilke points out that we can be shaken by losses and by gains, that we may be unsettled as much by negative encounters, adversity, difficulty, illness, loss, and death as by the peculiar intensification of our being in the experience of joy, friendship, creation, and, especially, love. He also stresses that during those experiences, even when they bring us closer to others, we are fundamentally alone. During such moments, when our life is suddenly open to questioning, we are cast back on ourselves without support from any outside agency. Every rite of passage—birth, adolescence, love, commitment, illness, loss, death—marks such an experience where we are faced with our solitude. But this is not a melancholic thought for Rilke. He revalorizes solitude as the occasion to reconsider our decisions and experiences, and to understand ourselves more accurately—and his words can serve as uncannily apt guides for such reflection.
 
If you are looking for specific guidance when your life confronts or rewards you with a particular challenge or opportunity, then go to a specific section. This book is organized in sections that match the overarching themes I found in the roughly seven thousand letters by Rilke I have read. The sequence of chapters and the excerpts within each chapter is not chronological but based on my experience of reading Rilke’s work. It maps life on a trajectory that leads from a consideration of being with others, work, adversity, education, nature, and solitude through illness, loss, and death to the emergence of ourselves into language, art, creation, and, finally, the culmination of ourselves in the experience of love. Oh, yes, Rilke is the great poet of love. He was not born that way, but his own experiences left him with no choice but to believe without surrender in that great, excessive possibility of loving another human being, which might befall any one of us at any moment. But, no, he is not sentimental. Love is placed at the end of this book because for Rilke love is work and, ultimately, a difficult achievement of the soul. In our age that is so hungry for spiritual sustenance and so easily seduced by the promise of salvation, Rilke proves relevant by defining love as modern man’s equivalent of the prayer to our vanished gods. It is the great gift that the otherwise radically indifferent if not inhospitable world can bestow on us— in the form of the encounter with another person. This is not an easy thing to phrase correctly. And there are countless other instances of small or vast internal shifts, which sometimes, but not always, coincide with socially marked and widely celebrated life events, that can benefit from the lucidity of Rilke’s prose. The Poet’s Guide to Life is meant to offer words that can capture the significance, the depth, the import of such occasions.