Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman

Letters to a Young Woman

✦ 39 ✦ Soglio/Graubünden, Switzerland August 2, 1919 I think, dear Madam, that I cannot answer the lines you are writing me any better and more precisely than by assuring you that I understand your impulse from which they have sprung. The object of art cannot change anything or improve anything the way it is; it faces people in the same way that nature does, full in and of itself, occupied with itself (like a fountain), or, if one wants to call it that, indifferent. But we know that this second nature that is reticent and self-restrained is also made up of human elements, wrought by the extremes of suffering and joy, and therein lies the key to the treasure chest of unbounded solace, which appears to be gathered in the work of art and to which especially the solitary person can claim a special , an inexpressible right. I know that there are moments in life, years perhaps, where one’s solitude in the midst of others reaches such a high degree that one would not have admitted to it if mentioned during times of casual, ordinary social gatherings . Nature cannot reach out to the person; rather, one has to have the strength to reinterpret it and woo it, translating it, so to speak, into human form in order to be able to draw near its smallest part. But this is precisely what one is unable to do when feeling absolutely lonely: one wants to be receiving a gift, unconditionally; one cannot afford to reach out, just as people at a low point of their vitality can barely open their mouths for the bite that is offered. That which really wants to 40 ✦ rainer maria rilke reach us and is meant to do so has to come over us, as if it felt nostalgia for the person, as if it had no other purpose than to take over the other’s life so as to transform every atom of life’s weakness into surrender. Even then, strictly speaking, nothing has really changed. It would be presumptuous to expect a work of art to help one. An object of art contains the tension in human life without appropriating it, and its inherent intensity derived from mere presence can, without exaggeration, give the impression of ambition, demand, invitation, wooing and captivating love, stimulation, call: that is the worthy calling (not function) of the work of art. And this illusionary relationship between the work of art and the lonely person is like all those priestly illusions by which, since the beginning of time, the divine has been invoked. I am immodestly explicit, but your letter has truly spoken to me—to me, not someone else who happens to have been addressed with my name by the letter writer—so that I wanted to be no less specific from my end and not offer you a platitude but rather the genuine, actual experience of being touched. The fact that you talk about your child lends your letter a touch of trust, which I can return in no other way than by a most ready willingness to take on that trust. If it were to give you pleasure, please tell me about this child and about you, even if it were to entail many pages. I am among those people, those old-fashioned ones, who still consider the letter a means of conversation, one of the most beautiful and promising ones. Of course, I have to add now that this attitude occasionally multiplies my correspondence beyond what I can handle, that often for months the work, or rather (as was the case during the entire war) an insurmountable “secheresse d’Âme” [dryness of the soul] keeps me quiet and dumb. But then I do not gauge human relationships in parsimonious and ever calculating human terms, but along those of nature. If you wish, may these lines then from now on serve as a connection and rendezvous between us. I will be absent for a long time, but, if you like, always be present again, knowing, understanding the way I was allowed to do today for the first time. Rainer Maria Rilke letters to a young woman ✦ 41 ✦ 42 ✦ Soglio (Bergell, Graubünden), Switzerland August 30, 1919 Dear Madam, From the start I want to clarify: be assured that never will one of your letters, as long as you choose to delight me...