Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet are required reading, and not just for poets, but for anyone engaged in difficult work — which includes creative pursuits, certainly, but also the work of being human. As Rilke writes, “it is clear we must hold to the difficult; everything that lives holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself according to its nature, and makes something of itself, tries to be itself at all costs, against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is weighty is a certainty that will never desert us; it is good to be solitary, since solitude is difficult; that a thing is difficult is all the more reason to choose it.”
Solitude is the key theme of these ten letters. Rilke says that “it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is not something one can choose or abandon. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves, and pretend it isn’t so, that’s all. But how much better to see that we are so, indeed to presume it.” This seems to contradict Aristotle’s famous maxim that man is by nature a social animal. But I think that both views are true — people are fundamentally communal creatures, but in the end, to indulge in a cliche, we’re born alone and we die alone. The tension between these two seemingly contradictory truths is precisely what gives human experience its shape, both its peaks and valleys. Or perhaps it is precisely the ultimate truth of our solitude — the fact that we are, in Rilke’s words, “unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us” — that leads us to yearn so strongly for social connection.
I think it’s more fruitful to oppose Rilke’s conception of solitude with the atomization inherent to modern life. If Rilke was already able to see this trend in his time — when his interlocutor, Franz Xaver Kappus, complains of feeling isolated from those around him, Rilke consoles him by pointing out “their activities are wretched, their vocations petrified and no longer connected to life”; later, when Kappus is feeling disillusioned by his life as a military officer, Rilke writes, “I know your profession is hard and conflicts with your being. . . . there is nothing I can say to reassure you, but simply suggest that all professions are like this, full of demands, and enmity against the individual, saturated, as it were, with the hatred of those who are dumb and sullen, locked in their solemn duties. The society in which you are forced to live is no more burdened with convention, prejudice and error than any other” — how much worse is the situation today?
This is in large part because although we are more isolated than ever, we’re also privy to an endless smorgasbord of consumer slop that keeps us from the hard but rewarding work of solitude. Why feel lonely when we can argue with people on Reddit, or get the quick dopamine fix of likes from a tweet? But in the end, these are pale facsimiles of real connections, and so we miss out on both meaningful socializing and the endless possibilities of true solitude.
Rilke’s emphasis on solitude isn’t a call to asceticism. He himself was far from anti-social, as his extensive correspondence attests to, to say nothing of his friends, lovers, and wife. But he also recognized “I, more than most, need those essential tools for writing: a modicum of silence, and solitude, and not too unfamiliar an hour.” And because he was willing and able to embrace being alone, he let himself cook, resulting in some of the finest poetry in the Western tradition.
Rilke sees love, like solitude, as one of the difficult (and therefore worthwhile) endeavors of a truly human existence. And one of the chief difficulties he recognizes, especially for young people, is that we use love to escape our solitude rather than as a safe haven to grow it and delve more deeply into it. Instead we throw ourselves at the object of our love, and lose ourselves in them, and when this unstable relationship inevitably falls apart, because we have sacrificed our solitude, the grieving process is even more difficult without that rich inner cave to take shelter in. I’ll end the post with a lengthy excerpt from Letter VII, because really I’m just poorly paraphrasing what Rilke says here, in one of the most poignant and profound passages ever written on the subject:
To love is good too: since love is difficult. For one person to love another: perhaps that is the most difficult thing granted us, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely a preparation. That is why young people who are beginners in everything are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, their whole strength, gathered about their solitary, anxious, upwardly beating heart, they must learn to love. But the time to learn is always a long, secluded time, and so loving is, for a long time to come and far into life – solitude, a growing and deepening solitude for those who love. Love, to begin with, is not something that means merging, yielding, uniting with another (for what would a union of the unclarified, unfinished, incoherent be?), it is a sublime moment for individual maturation, to become something within oneself, to become a world, a world for oneself for another’s sake, it is a great and unrestrained claim on one, something that chooses the individual and summons one to vaster spaces. Only in that sense, as the task of labouring at oneself (‘hearkening and hammering day and night’) should the young employ the love that is granted them.
Yet this where the young often err, and most seriously: in that they (whose nature it is to be impatient) throw themselves at each other when love overwhelms them, and scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their carelessness, disorder, confusion…And what can happen thus? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things they call their communion, and would like to call their happiness, as if that were their business, and their future? Each one loses themselves for the sake of the other, and thereby loses the other and the many others who still wanted to be. And abandons the wider space of possibility, exchanging the nearing and fleeing of gentle things, full of foreboding, for a sterile confusion out of which nothing further can come; nothing but disgust at the least, and disappointment and impoverishment, and escape into one of the many conventions erected like public shelters in vast numbers on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is as hedged with convention as this: there are life-belts of the most varied invention, and boats and water-wings; the social order was able to create every kind of refuge, for since it was inclined to consider the life of love as a life of pleasure, it had to make the pursuit of it easy, cheap, and safe and sure as public amusements are.
Yet this where the young often err, and most seriously: in that they (whose nature it is to be impatient) throw themselves at each other when love overwhelms them, and scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their carelessness, disorder, confusion…And what can happen thus? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things they call their communion, and would like to call their happiness, as if that were their business, and their future? Each one loses themselves for the sake of the other, and thereby loses the other and the many others who still wanted to be. And abandons the wider space of possibility, exchanging the nearing and fleeing of gentle things, full of foreboding, for a sterile confusion out of which nothing further can come; nothing but disgust at the least, and disappointment and impoverishment, and escape into one of the many conventions erected like public shelters in vast numbers on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is as hedged with convention as this: there are life-belts of the most varied invention, and boats and water-wings; the social order was able to create every kind of refuge, for since it was inclined to consider the life of love as a life of pleasure, it had to make the pursuit of it easy, cheap, and safe and sure as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love incorrectly, that is simply devotedly and incoherently (the average person will always hold to that), feel oppressed by failure and wish to make the situation they are in viable and fruitful in their own individual way – for their nature tells them that matters of love, even less than of anything else of importance, cannot be resolved publicly, according to this or that social contract; that there are questions, intimate question, asked by one person of another, that in every case require a new, special, wholly personal answer – yet how can they, who have already hurled themselves at each other, and can no longer distinguish or differentiate themselves, who no longer possess anything of their own, find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of a solitude they have each already interred?
They act from mutual helplessness, and when, with the best of intentions, they wish to escape the convention that afflicts them (marriage for example) they fall into the tentacled grasp of a quieter but equally fatal and conventional solution; for then everything around them is pure convention; there where everyone acts out of a prematurely merged, troubled communion, every act is conventional: every relationship to which such confusion leads has its own convention, however strange it may be (immoral, that is, in the ordinary sense); yes, even separation would prove a conventional step, an impersonal, chance decision, without strength or fear of consequence.
Whoever considers it seriously, finds that neither for dying, which is hard, nor for difficult love has any explanation, solution, or hint of a path been found; and for these two tasks, which we carry out veiled and pass on without disclosing, no common agreed rule can be discovered. Yet as we begin to test out life as individuals these great things will approach us more nearly. The demands that the difficult labour of love makes on our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners are unequal to them. But if we endure, if we accept this love as a burden and an apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all of that easy and careless game behind which people have hidden from the most serious solemnity of existence – then a small advance and an easing of the burden might be perceived by those who will follow, long after us. That would be much.
We are only now beginning to consider the relationship between one individual and another objectively, without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet the changing times contain much that can help our timid beginners. The young girl, the woman, in her new individual purity, will only imitate for a time male behaviour and misbehaviour, and the repetitive male professions. After the uncertainty of such a transition, it will be clearly seen that women only wore the varying multitude of those (often ridiculous) disguises so as to purify their own being of the deforming influence of the opposite sex. Woman, in whom life dwells and lives more immediately, more fruitfully, more confidently, must have become at root more mature, more human than lightweight man, who is not drawn into the depths of life by the weight of that physical fruitfulness, he who, arrogant and hasty, underestimates that which he thinks he loves.
One day (of which even now, particularly in the Nordic countries, sure signs emerge and shine), one day will be young girls, and women, whose name will no longer simply signify the opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one thinks not of limitation, of a mere complement, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This development will transform the experience of love, so full of error (at first very much against the will of those men who are left behind), and reshape it from the ground up, altering it to a relationship meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one directed from a man to a woman. And this more human love (which will be infinitely considerate and calm, and achieved with kindness and clarity in its binding and loosening) will resemble that which we now prepare, painfully and laboriously, a love that consists of two solitudes protecting and bordering on, and greeting each other.
The Mind Vineyard 