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NOTE
I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and just got to it.
In Paris to write a monograph for Auguste Rodin (the older man offered him a model of how an artist can ground himself in steady, patient work). But he felt estranged with the people of Paris:
I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of them… And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week… I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them.
“Capacity to be alone”
Poetic practice requires solitude
ask yourself in the night’s quietest hour: must I write?
then try, like the first human being to say what you see and experience, and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid at first those forms that are too habitual and familiar: they are the hardest for you need great maturity and strength to produce something of your own in a domain where good and sometimes brilliant examples have been handed down to us in abundance.
take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadness and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty - depict this all with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, images from your dreams or memories.
If your everyday life seems to lack material do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to summon up its riches for there is no lack for him who create and no poor, trivial place. Trapped Projects
Out of all my books there are only a few I cannot do without…
Avoid aesthetics and criticism:
Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.
NOTE
I remember looking at this college course in digital design that I had worked for. This was many years back and I was curious what the students were producing and how things had changed. I noticed that there was a video that documented a project they had done. The idea seemed to be to incorporate a photo of yourself in a graphic that showed your interests. For example one girl liked to travel, and so she showed pictures of herself in Paris with maps and passports. Another person clearly liked computers, and did themselves in that typical Neo-look with green waterfall text.
It was really easy to have a kneejerk laugh at these, because the majority were so amateur, kitsch and crude. But I grew to appreciate the earnestness of them.
In a world saturated with selfies, we were getting effort and expression even if packaged strangely.
be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not strive to uncover answers; they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them.
NOTE
I see what is being said here regarding experience and answers. It is the difference between being told something and understanding it. You can receive an answer on an exam and get the answer or understand a specific technique to massage out the answer in this context. But the exact path of knowledge to “grokking” requires a type of living with the question.
I’ll often have this happen to me. I trace a series of thoughts in my mind that connect me to some point, that might feel epiphanic. When I apply that to the page, it is deflated. The word connections don’t precisely map out the feeling. I’ve lost it.
NOTE
I’m getting a sense that because the age between these two, RMR is speaking thoughts he had to himself about himself.
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude and great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours - that is what one must arrive at.
bound up with things which seemed grave and weighty, because they looked so busy and because one had no idea what they were up to. And then one day you realize that their preoccupations are meager, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depth of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is a work and achievement and a vocation Loneliness and Cosmic Isolation
if there is no communal feelings between you and other people, try to be near to things - they will not abandon you. The nights are still there and the winds that go through the trees over the many lands
Love/death
Whoever looks at the matter seriously finds that, as for death, which is difficult, no explanation, no solution, has yet been discovered for love, which is difficult too: there are no directions, no path. And for these two problems that we carry around with us in a sealed packet and hand on without opening, it will always be impossible to locate a common rule, resting on consensus. But to the same extent that we begin as individual to venture onto life, these great things will encounter us, on our own, at ever closer quarters. The demands that the hard work of love makes on our development are larger than life, and as beginners we are no match for them. But if we can hold out and take this love upon us as a burden and an apprenticeship… then perhaps a small advance and some relief will be sensible to those who come long after us.
on the letters
riike is more interested in the young man with his various difficulties and questions, than the young poet. His only response to the poems is that they have no identify of their own (a comment which he must be aware equally applied to his early verse)
it does seem to be the case that the apparent authority which Riike speaks to Kappus comes from a strong sense of how greatly in need he is of his own advice, and that the words are found because it is as much his own dilemmas as Kappus’s that he is looking for answers to.