Chapter 10 10. The Eighth Letter

Dear Mr. Kappus, I would like to speak to you again, though I can hardly say anything that will be helpful or useful to you.You have had many great sorrows, and those sorrows are over.You said that this sad past also troubled you very much.But, please think about it, have these great sorrows never passed through the center of your life?When you mourn, is there not much change in your life, no change anywhere in your nature?Dangerous and nasty are those sorrows which we transport into crowds to muffle their voices; like ills which are perfunctory and perfunctory, only recede for a while, and later come back more dreadfully; An unlived, outcast, abandoned life can kill us.

If we could see a little farther than our usual knowledge can go, and pass a little beyond the outposts of our presentiments, then perhaps we would bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys.For they (sorrow) are those moments when something new and strange invades our being; when our emotions crouch in timid cramps, everything recedes into a stillness, and the unknown " "Xin" stood in the middle, silent. I would like to believe that almost all of our grief is a tense moment when we feel numb because we no longer hear the amazed emotional existence.Because we have to deal alone with this strange intruder; because what we usually trust and are used to has temporarily left us; because we are in a process that cannot allow us to stand.

But once this unexpected new thing enters our life, enters our heart, dissolves into nothingness in the deepest part of our heart, and dissolves in our blood, the sorrow will pass away.We no longer experience what it was like then.It is easy to lead us to believe that nothing happened before; we have changed, just as a house changes when a new visitor comes in.We can't say who is coming, we may not know it after looking back, but there are many signs telling us that before the "future" happens, it sneaks into our lives in this way in order to change within us.So it is important that we be content with our loneliness in our sad moments, and pay attention: for the moment when our "future" sneaks into our lives, it seems empty and dead, but it is not the same as that which comes from outside, for Much closer to life than the tumultuous and unexpected moments that happen to us.The quieter, more patient, and more frank we are when we mourn, the deeper and more clearly this new thing enters our life, the better we protect it, and the more it becomes our own destiny; Someday it will "happen"

(that is to say: it comes out of our lives and goes in to others), we will feel that we are intimate and close to it in the innermost place.And it is necessary.It is necessary—we will gradually develop in that direction—everything that comes our way is not unfamiliar, and it already belongs to us.People have changed so many definitions of operation, and they will gradually realize in the future that our so-called destiny comes out of our "human beings", not entering into our "human beings" from the outside.Just because there are many who, when fate lived within them, did not assimilate it and make it their own, so they did not recognize what emerged from them; Thinking that fate must be entering their lives at this moment, because they are sure they have never seen anything like it.Just as there was a long period of delusions about the workings of the sun, so men are now equally deluded about the workings of the future.In fact, the "future" stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in this endless space.

How can we not feel difficult? If we talk about loneliness again, it will become more obvious that it is not at all something we can choose or leave behind. We are all lonely.People can deceive themselves, as if they are not lonely.That's all.But how good it would be if we could once see that we are all coming out of this deceitful situation.During this period, we will naturally feel dizzy; because everything our eyes are used to seeing is suddenly lost at this moment, there is no close thing anymore, and all the distance is infinitely far away.Whoever is suddenly displaced from his house, without preparation, without process, on the top of a line of mountains must feel something similar; an incomparable uneasiness delivered to nameless things that almost destroys him.He may imagine falling, or believe he will be thrown into the sky, or be crushed to pieces; what a lie his mind must discover, to remedy, to account for his state of sensual disorientation.All distances and measures are changed for the lonely man; and out of these changes suddenly come many changes.Like the man on the top of the mountain, there are many very imaginative and strange feelings, which seem to surpass all things that can bear.But that's necessary, and we experience it too.We must bear our existence as broadly as possible; everything, even the unheard of, may exist in it.At all that is the only courage we are asked of; to stand up to the strangest, most surprising, most incomprehensible things that we can encounter.Just because many are cowardly in this sense, life is infinitely marred; people call it "magic"

The experiences of life, the so-called "ghost world," death, and everything that connects us, are crowded out of life by our daily defenses, and even our senses that can receive them are withered.About "God", it is simply impossible to talk about it.But the fear of the incomprehensible not only impoverishes individual existence, but also limits human relations, as if fished out of a river bed of infinite possibilities and placed on a barren shore. .Because this is not only a kind of inertia, which makes the relationship between people extremely monotonous and repeats the old things again and again, but also a shrinking from any kind of unpredictable and uncompetent new life.But if a man is prepared for everything, even the greatest charade, he will experience his relations with other people as living things, and even fully understand his own existence.Just as we see each person's existence as a larger or smaller space, so most people recognize only a corner of their space, a space in front of a window, or a narrow passage in which they walk.This way they have a certain stability.But that dangerous restlessness is more human, and it can prompt the prisoners in Poe's stories to grope the shape of their dreadful prison and become acquainted with the unspeakable horrors of their dwellings.But we are not prisoners, no one has laid a trap around us, nothing to frighten us and trouble us.We live as if in the elements best suited to us, and we have adapted and lived so alike through millennia that if we stand still, by a successful imitation, it is difficult Distinct from everything around us.We have no reason not to trust our world, since it is not hostile to us.If it has fear, it is our fear; if it has unfathomable abysses, the abyss is ours; if it has dangers, we must try to love those dangers.Things that are now strangest will become dearest and most faithful, if we arrange our lives according to the principle that we must always grasp the difficult.How can we forget the myths that all peoples had in the primitive times; the myth that the dragon turned into a princess at the most urgent moment; maybe all the dragons in our lives are princesses, they are just waiting, beautiful And take a brave look at us.Perhaps all horrible things are helpless at their deepest depths, calling to us for help.

Dear Mr. Kappus, if there should come before you a sorrow of such vastness as you have never seen before, if a restlessness should pass like light and shadow over your deeds and all your work, do not be afraid. .You have to think that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands, that it will never let you down.Why do you keep out of your life an uneasiness, a pain, a depression when you don't know what work these conditions are doing for you?Why do you keep asking, where did all this come from and where is it going?But you have to know that you are in transition and you want to change yourself.If some of your processes are pathological, think about it, illness is a method by which the organism liberates itself from strange things; so we just have to make it sick, give it a whole episode Because this is progress.Dear Mr. Kappus, with so much going on within you right now, you have to be as patient as a sick man and as confident as a convalescent; you may be both at the same time.And you have to be your own doctor.But there are often many days in an illness when the doctor can do nothing but wait.This is (as long as you are your doctor), the first thing that must be done now.

Don't be too observant of yourself.Don't draw quick conclusions from what happens to you, let them simply run their course.Otherwise it is easy for you to look back at your past with all kinds of (so-called moral) condemnation, which of course has a lot to do with everything you encounter now.Whatever continues to affect you in you from your childhood strays, wishes, longings, they are not for you to recall, but for you to judge.The very circumstances of a lonely and lonely childhood are so difficult, so complicated, subject to so many external influences, and at the same time so detached from all real-life connections, that even if there were sins in childhood, we should not simply call them sin.Much attention must be paid to many names; often it is only the name of sin that breaks life, and not the nameless, personal act itself, which may be a prescribed necessity of life, and which it readily accepts.Because you overestimate victory, you feel such a drain on your strength; victory is not the "greatness" that you think you have accomplished, even if you think it is right: "greatness" is that you can put something real, substantial instead of cheating.Otherwise your victory is nothing more than a moral reaction, without great significance, but it becomes a part of your life.Dear Mr. Kappus, I have many wishes about my life.Do you remember how this life came out of childhood and yearned for "greatness"?I watch, and it now advances from these greatnesses, yearning for greater things.So there is no end to the hard life, but therefore there is no end to the growth.

If I should say one more thing to you, it is this: Do not believe that the person who tries to comfort you lives without care in those simple and calm words that sometimes do you good.His life has been full of hardships and sorrows, and he has dedicated himself to helping you from afar.Otherwise, he would never have been able to find those few words. Yours: Rainer Maria Rilke 1904, 8, 12; Sweden, Fladie, Borgeby Garb ① Allan Poe (Allan Poe, 1809-1849), American novelist and poet, is famous for describing mysterious horror stories.This refers to one of his novels, The Pit and the Pendulum, which describes the horror of a condemned man groping for the walls and guessing the shape of a dark prison.