Notebook for Letters to a Young Poet Rilke, Rainer Maria Citation (APA): Rilke, R. M. (2013). Letters to a Young Poet [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com The Letters Highlight (yellow) - Page 11 You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and you are troubled when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (as you have permitted me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must”, then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse. Highlight (yellow) - Page 12 Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your own everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty —depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. Highlight (yellow) - Page 13 A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Highlight (yellow) - Page 13 Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds, without enquiring too closely into every word. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself. Note - Page 13 This is so great. It even connects to the perfect reason to start a startup: because you must. Because it has to be you because only you can do it. It connects with the path that Taleb has awakened: that of the rational flaneur. I think deep inside, there is a narrative there that even we are not aware of like what Taleb means when he says "we do not need to know x to adjust our f(x)" and that's what the rational flaneur does, he creates a convex function that allows us to fully realize x or what we MUST do. I love the "without enquiring too closely to every word". Sometimes during meditation I find truths about myself that are uncomfortable. But maybe instead of feeling bad about them I should just accept them as my truth, these ugly bits are part of who I am and perhaps when a beast accepts it is a beast then and only then can it begin to get better. Even in psychology or in meditation, when you keep something inside it festers. Another note: perhaps poets and writers pass information through the generations in an elegant way, much like how compression algorithms work. And once you find how to extract the meaning correctly, there's a dearth of information to be had. Poetry is like math but teaches different lessons. Highlight (yellow) - Page 13 I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer. Note - Page 13 To not jealously look at others' progress but rather take the advice given "during your most silent hour" (meditation). Highlight (yellow) - Page 17 Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth. To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that is alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation. Highlight (yellow) - Page 21 have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. Note - Page 21 Being happy with the process and the progression however slow. Highlight (yellow) - Page 23 be glad of your growing, into which you can take no one else with you, and be good to those that remain behind, and be self-possessed and quiet with them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not comprehend. Seek some unpretending and honest communion with them, which you are under no necessity to alter when you yourself become more and more different; love life in a strange guise in them, and make allowance for those ageing people who fear the solitude in which you trust. Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at bottom the helplessness that seeks our help. Highlight (yellow) - Page 40 Do you remember how this life has longed ever since childhood for the “great”? I see how it is now longing to leave the great for greater. Therefore it does not cease to be difficult, but therefore it will not cease, either, to grow. Commentary Highlight (yellow) - Page 52 “If God has given a commandment, it is this: Be solitary from time to time. For he can come only to one man, or to two whom he can no longer distinguish” Highlight (yellow) - Page 52 In solitude, too, one might learn to understand things, and draw near to them. “Have you never yet noticed how despised and insignificant things come to themselves if they fall into the ready, tender hands of a solitary? They are like little birds to whom warmth returns, they bestir themselves, awaken, and a heart begins to beat in them, that rises and falls like the uttermost wave of a mighty ocean in the hearkening hands” Highlight (yellow) - Page 52 Solitude was not arrived at numerically, but qualitatively—“Friends do not prevent our solitude, they only limit our aloneness”