For Readers Young or Old, 2009 and Beyond
If you’re like me, there are certain books you faithfully reread from year to year. Recently, traipsing through past calendars in my mind, I was startled to realize that a certain little volume has commanded my attention for more than half my lifetime.
Since first reading this volume, I’ve never once had it out of reach. I’ve grown up with its voice in my ears — grown up, in many respects, because of its guidance.
I was fourteen-years-old when my mother, somehow recognizing my writerly inclinations in a way I could not, put into my hands a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It was a thin, feather-light edition of Stephen Mitchell’s marvelous English translation. I didn’t like the cover with its bright colors and gaudy font, but upon opening to the first letter of February 1903 I promptly experienced what nearly three generations of readers had experienced before me: the unshakable sense that this missive was addressed directly to me.
Keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
Come twilight I’d finished the book, and already I wanted to learn more about this letter-writer from ninety years past who seemed to know so much about me and the counsel I so desperately needed in my current day. I could not have foreseen what a lasting literary specter he would become in my life, nor how he would haunt my decision to become a writer.
People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. — Letter Eight, August 1904
Today, sixteen years later, I’m the author of a novel about Rainer Maria Rilke’s troubled, triumphant life.
Perhaps more than any poet of the western world, Rilke was incapable of living one life as a man, another as a poet. Here was a soul who completely lacked the useful membrane that protects most of us from certain experiences or stimuli. Uncontrollably, every impression penetrated him to his core and became an almost physical vibration within him. It’s as if he was genetically predisposed to poetry — to those profound resonances of which poetry is made.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. — Letter Eight, August 1904
Rilke’s writings, in their powerful and pungent synthesis of mystery, terror, and praise, hold a resonance like no other literary work I know of. The life behind the work is its own strange, by turns troubling and inspiring story of long sacrifice and sudden moments of transcendence. And the poet’s artful and penetrating letters, particularly the ten cherished epistles of Letters to a Young Poet, fulminate with counsel to last one a lifetime.
More brother than book, Letters to a Young Poet has become a part of me and I of it. Our relationship has evolved and expanded through the seasons of my life and continues to do so. On some pages I find lines I doubly underscored years ago. Once booming with life-altering significance, these lines now have the stately quietness of old truths; other lines once inconspicuous or remote now boom.
Rilke’s figure continues to haunt me. My novel about him is in many ways the result of a long conversation with a master, a ghost. A reply, perhaps, to these letters I first read at fourteen and felt to be written to me across the span of a century.
For anyone hoping in this new year to nurture creativity or to find a voice of wisdom on the matters most relevant to the soul: relationships, religion, and the roundness of everyday existence, I can’t recommend Letters to a Young Poet highly enough.
(By the way, the much older Norton translation of Letters to a Young Poet is also wonderful.)
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