Rilke on Solitude


Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters To A Young Poet

1903-1908
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country.

It is true that many young people who love wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarliy (the average will of course always go on doing so), feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation win which they have landed viable and fruitful in their won personal way-; for their nature tells them that, less even all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special only personal answer-: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?

they act out of common helplessness, and then, if, with the best intentions, they try to avoid the convention that occurs to them (say marriage), they land in the tentacles of some less loud, but equally deadly conventional solution; for then everything far around them is - convention; where people act out of a prematurely fused, turbid communion, every move is convention: every relation to such entanglement leads has its convention, be it ever so unusual (that is, in the ordinary since immoral); why, even separation would here be a conventional step, and impersonal chance decision without strength and without fruit.

We are only just now beginning to look upon the relation of one individual person to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such associations have no model before them. And yet in the changes brought about by time there is already a good deal that would help our timorous novitiate.

Sonnet

Through my life there trembles without plaint,
without a sigh a deep dark melancholy.
the pure and snowy blossoming of my dreams
is the consecration of my stillest days.

But oftentimes the great question crosses
my path. I become small and go
coldly past as though along some lake
whose flood I have not hardihood to measure.

And then a sorrow sinks upon me, dusky
as the gray of lusterless summer nights
through which a star glimmers - now and then - :

My hands then gropingly reach out for love,
because I want so much to pray sounds
that my hot mouth cannot find.

. Franz Kappus - (The Young Poet)