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A review by woolfen
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
4.0
3.5-4 Stars.
- Initially, this book landed very well and was 5 stars, but then waned in what I got out of it. I think upon a reread I would rate it higher. I read it in great bursts, after not touching it for a while.
A delightful reflection on solitude that urges us to find comfort and well-being in the development of loneliness, of trusting in the movements of human souls. A romantic existential counsel on what it means to live.
"[I] beg you earnestly to have patience will all unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not search now for the answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live. That is the point, to live everything."
"To love, too, is good, for love is difficult. Loving between human being and human being, that is perhaps the most difficult thing with which we have been charged... With their whole being, with all their strength collected about their lonely, timid, upward straining heats they must learn to love. Apprenticeship is always a long time of seclusion, and so love, too, is for a long time right far into life, just loneliness, increased and deepened solitude for him who loves."
"Of these changes, many may happen suddenly, and then as with the man on the mountain-top, there arise strange fancies and unusual feelings, which seem to be greater than he can. But it is necessary for us to experience that, too. We must accept existence as far as ever it is possible. Everything, even the most unheard of things, must be possible in it."
"You over-estimate the victory; it is not the victory that is the 'great thing' you think you have performed... The great thing is this, that there was already something there which you could put in the place of that deception, something true and real."
- Initially, this book landed very well and was 5 stars, but then waned in what I got out of it. I think upon a reread I would rate it higher. I read it in great bursts, after not touching it for a while.
A delightful reflection on solitude that urges us to find comfort and well-being in the development of loneliness, of trusting in the movements of human souls. A romantic existential counsel on what it means to live.
"[I] beg you earnestly to have patience will all unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not search now for the answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live. That is the point, to live everything."
"To love, too, is good, for love is difficult. Loving between human being and human being, that is perhaps the most difficult thing with which we have been charged... With their whole being, with all their strength collected about their lonely, timid, upward straining heats they must learn to love. Apprenticeship is always a long time of seclusion, and so love, too, is for a long time right far into life, just loneliness, increased and deepened solitude for him who loves."
"Of these changes, many may happen suddenly, and then as with the man on the mountain-top, there arise strange fancies and unusual feelings, which seem to be greater than he can. But it is necessary for us to experience that, too. We must accept existence as far as ever it is possible. Everything, even the most unheard of things, must be possible in it."
"You over-estimate the victory; it is not the victory that is the 'great thing' you think you have performed... The great thing is this, that there was already something there which you could put in the place of that deception, something true and real."