Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Stephen Mitchell, trans. New York: Vintage, 1986, p.41-2.
Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
2 comments:
As we grow spiritually, how do we remain connected to those who are not growing in the same ways we are? In this passage, Rilke writes to a young poet who is learning to live in “the aloneness that you trust,” a painful and yet beautiful state that he may not be able to share with many others. Rilke suggests that he touch those others with gentleness, simplicity, and the true feelings that he shares with them.
May I reach out to others with simplicity, gentleness, and authentic feeling, even as I accept that others may not always understand my own experiences.
God, help me to embrace solitude instead of resisting it, to drink from it instead of trying endlessly to fill it.
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