‘Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror. Keep moving on. No feeling is final.’ This Rilke quote appears at the end of a brilliant comedy-satire movie on Hitler and his atrocities called ‘Jojo Rabbit’. In that movie, our little Jojo, a German boy whose mother has sheltered a Jewish girl, defends his nation by saying that the Germans have Rilke!
Although Rilke is an Austrian poet, he wrote mainly in German. Rilke’s popularity is ubiquitous among the many contemporary writers of today, who adore him for his tendering wisdom and his admirable honesty towards what is difficult in life and sticking up to it. Apart from the movie ‘Jojo Rabbit’, I’ve heard praised for Rilke of Krista Tippet from ‘On Being’ podcast; from Maria Popova of ‘The Marginalian’; from Rain Wilson, AKA Dwight from The Office, on his podcast ‘The Metaphysical Milkshake’, and so on and so forth.
So, before coming to this book, which I picked as my gateway into reading poetry more regularly, beside my usual readings of fiction and nonfiction books, I was quite expectant, given Rilke’s fame, as to what I’d be taking away. Yet looking at this slice of a book, so thin that it barely holds any weight or thickness, one cannot possibly expect to take much away from it, or at least enough to form a significant space in one’s reading journey and acquired knowledge.
But to my beautiful surprise, as to everyone else’s who will fortunately get to read ‘this slice of a book’, I was much, too much, affected by the accompanying, reassuring, and uplifting words of Rilke. Composed of ten letters, written between 1903-1908, when Rilke was in his late-twenties to mid-thirties, this book comprises of at once deep and transcending wisdom upon the sensitivities of an uncomfortable artist, that is, an artist not used to his surrounding, to the weathers of the outside and in.
These letters were written by Rilke in response to a young poet by the name of Franz Xaver Kappus, who latter compiled them into a book and named it ‘Letters to a Young Poet’. Being from the same military school as Rilke, young Kappus gets in touch with Rilke upon coming in knowledge of this fact, and during their years-long correspondence through letters, he asks Rilke about all that might trouble a young sensitive soul: love, loneliness, pain, work, sex, doubt, lostness, and so on.
Kappus’s letters aren’t included in this book, only those of Rilke’s which he wrote in response; yet by reading Rilke letters and his advice on these touching matters, we get the idea of what is being talked about, what those major and intervening matters are of which Rilke knows well and offers his insightful and reassuring words.
Being more than a decade in future of when this solitary correspondence took place between two solitary and sensitive people, it was almost awe-inspiringly touching and fascinating that I felt, in these letters, so keenly understood, explained, and soothed in my unexplainable, elusive, and bothering moods and tendencies. This book holds uncommonly pithy and befriending effects to it, where Rilke’s words would, to any self-consciously sensitive person, produce a calming and wholesome feeling of finally having been heard, understood, and reassured – in matters to which the world seems too unconcerned or even ignorant of.
In ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, every one of us sensitive and vulnerable souls, living a world so loud, so busy, so occupied, would find a friend, a mentor, and a tutor all in one. To have read this book once is to have a found a precious gem, and to read it again and again, would then be to bask in all its glory, to reach out to its hearing ears and soothing words, every time the world overwhelms us and the loneliness isolates us.
This slice of a book is truly one of the books that I’ve been looking for all this while…
Ratings: 5/5 March 1, 2022_