Chapter 8 8. The sixth letter

My dear Mr. Kappus, You will not fail to have my wish, if Christmas comes, and you carry your solitude in this holiday more deeply than ever.If you think it's too big, rejoice in it (ask yourself), there's no loneliness, it's not big; we only have "one" loneliness that's big and unbearable, and almost everyone has it At times of danger, they are willing to exchange loneliness with any kind of vulgar and boring social interaction, and the illusion of barely reconciling with any unsuitable person... But maybe it is these times that loneliness grows; Growth is painful, like the development of a boy, and sad, like the beginning of spring.Don't be fooled by this.

What we need most is just: loneliness, the loneliness of the vast heart. "Go inward" and meet no one for a long time—this we must be able to do.To live alone, as one is lonely when one is a child, and the adults come and go, entangled in matters that seem important, and the adults are in such a hurry, but the child does not know what they do. If one day we realize that their affairs are impoverished, their occupations are dry and unrelated to life, then why don't we start from the depths of our own world, from the depths of our own loneliness (this loneliness itself is work, status, occupation), and see them as foreign things like children?Why put aside a child's clever "incomprehension" and adopt an attitude of defense and contempt for many things? "I don't understand"

It is solitude; defense and contempt, though they seek to separate themselves from these things, are at the same time entangled with them. Dear sir, you think about the world you carry yourself; as for what you call this thinking, it is up to you; whether it is the memory of your own childhood, or the desire for your own future--just pay more attention to it. What comes up in your life, put it above everything you see around you.The thing deepest in you is worthy of your wholehearted love, for which you must work in many ways; and do not waste much time and energy in explaining your attitude to people.Who told you that you originally had an attitude? ——I know that your career is boring and contradicts you everywhere. I have already seen your distress, and I know that it will come.Now that it is here, I can't resolve your distress, I can only advise you to think about whether all occupations are like this, making unreasonable demands on individuals, full of hostility, and it also suffers from many lows. The loathing of those who hold back and are dissatisfied with their boring duties.You see, the occupation with which you are now dealing is not necessarily more burdened by custom, by prejudice, by error, than by any other occupation; There is vocation far and wide within itself, connected with the great things out of which real life is made.Only the lonely individual, who is placed like a "thing" under the deep laws of nature, when he walks towards the morning that is just breaking, or looks out into the night full of extraordinary events, when he feels what is happening there, All position would leave him, as from a dead man, even though he was in the middle of real life.Dear Mr. Kappus, what you now have to experience as an officer, you may feel in any existing occupation, even if you break away from various duties and seek an easy and independent contact with society alone , this sense of oppression will not relieve you in any way. —It is the same everywhere: but this is not enough to make us fear and mourn; if you have no harmony between man and me, try to get close to things, they will not abandon you; and the night, and the wind—then The wind that blows through the woods and across the fields; among the things and with the animals, everything is full of things you can share; and the children, as you experienced in childhood, sad and happy,— —If you think of your childhood, you are again among those lonely children, adults are indifferent, their dignity has no value.

If you are troubled by the fact that you can no longer believe in the gods that appeared everywhere in your childhood, and when you think of childhood and the simplicity and silence connected with it, then, dear Mr. Kappus, ask yourself, do you Have you really lost God?Maybe on the contrary, you never got him?When should there be a God?Do you believe, about God, that a child can hold him, that grown men can only bear him, and that he is heavy enough to overwhelm an old man?Do you believe that whoever really has him can lose him like a small flake? Or don't you think that whoever has him can only be thrown away by him? —but if you realize that he was not in your childhood, nor existed before; if you feel that Christ was deceived by his longing, and Mohammad by his pride,—if You feel with astonishment that even now, even at this moment when we speak of him, he does not exist;—what, then, gives you the right to feel that the lack of this god that never existed is like losing a dead man, and to seek him like Looking for a lost item?

Why don't you think that He's coming, He's coming from eternity, the last fruit of a tree of which we're but leaves?Who is stopping you from placing his birth in times of change to come, from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in this great pregnancy?Don't you see how everything that happens always starts over?Couldn't that be the beginning of God?Ah, the beginning itself is always so beautiful!If he is most complete, should lesser things exist before him, so that he can choose from fullness and excess? ——Shouldn't he be the last one, holding everything in his arms?What is the use of us if what we hope for has already passed away?

Like bees making honey, we gather the sweetest stuff out of all things to build our gods.We begin even with small, insignificant things (so long as it is from love), we work, and we rest, with a silence, or with a tiny joy of loneliness, when we have no friends, no companions alone All that was done to build him, he, we cannot see, any more than our ancestors could see us.But those long-gone people still exist in our lives, as our endowment, as the burden of our destiny, as circulating blood, as a gesture rising from the depths of time. Won't the things you can't hope for now be realized in the farthest and ultimate God one day in the future?

Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate your Christmas with this pious feeling, maybe God is just about to start with the fear of your life; these few days you are living may be all that is working for him in your life period, just as you had already worked hard for him once as a child.Bear well, and do not be discouraged, you think, if spring comes, the earth makes it work little by little, and the least work we can do will not make the birth of God any more difficult than the earth does to spring. I wish you happy and brave! Yours: Rene Maria Rilke 1903, 12, 23; Rome