Ultimately and especially in the deepest and most important matters we are indescribably alone. We’re trying to have another convince us that some unpleasant truth isn’t so.īut only when you can honestly take that monkey off your own back and look it straight in the face will the monster shrink in size. What we’re typically asking for is validation. And when we are we’re rarely ready to act upon it. When we ask others for advice, we’re rarely asking for advice. Trust that you’re the best person to ask advice from when it comes to matters of your own heart. It’s a truly courageous act to trust yourself. I wasted too much time asking advice from people who had no business giving it. This is a lesson that I’ve come to late in life. You are looking toward the outside, and that above all is the one thing you should not do at this moment. It’s got my notes inside but, if you don’t mind that, it’s yours. Also, I’m happy to send the first person to ask my copy. I highly recommend you try to source this translation as it is superb.
So I was never able to sit across from the kindred soul and grand mentor that is Rainer Maria Rilke in the flesh.Īnd, doing them no justice whatsoever, I have decided to note a few of my favourite passages from Letters to a Young Poet in the hopes that you pick up the volume yourself.Īll quotes are taken from the Insel Verlag translation by Ulrich Baer. Now it’s dirtied, muddied with my ink, each blot marking a revelation. The book was clean and pristine when I bought it. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet leapt from the shelf right as I wandered in from the Viennese streets having pounded the pavement thinking about change.Īnd for the rest of the day the book didn’t leave my hands. This happens in your personal relationships (like Misha Thomas who appeared angelically in my life).Įnter a bookstore with a mind full of questions and a heart swollen to bursting and books will leap out at you, like magically animated medicine flying off the apothecary’s shelves. They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Life Lessons from Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet Review I’m lamenting my inability to connect personally to writers of such stature and such deep understanding of the human condition as Rainer Maria Rilke. I’m lamenting the lack of such powerful guiding lights in today’s cultural climate.
Why is it that a series of ten letters from one Austrian poet to a younger apprentice poet read like the greatest self-help book I’ve ever read? Why are my greatest mentors men and women who died long before I was born?
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