Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. Of course, you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure.

Please be indulgent with the answer, which may often leave you empty-handed. In the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone. Many things must happen, many things must go right, and a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled for one human being to successfully advise or help another.

But this power does not always seem completely straightforward and without pose. (But that is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob them of their candor and innocence!) When it arrives at the sexual, it finds someone who is not quite as pure as it needs him to be. Instead of a completely ripe and pure world of sexuality, it finds a world that is not human enough, that is only male, is heat, thunder, and restlessness, and burdened with the old prejudice and arrogance with which the male has always disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves only as a male, and not as a human being, there is something narrow in his sexual feeling, something that seems wild, malicious, time-bound, and uneternal. This diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate, it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will endure. (But most art is like that!) Perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think. The great renewal of the world may consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors. They will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.

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. Be gentle with those who stay behind. Be confident and calm in front of them. 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.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet