Raincoast

The competitive world of academia often leaves us as students feeling deficient in some way when we compare ourselves to others. Having recently read a collection of works, Letters to a Young Poet, by the German poet and author Rainer Maria Rilke, I felt it appropriate to share the messages I took away from it. The letters in this compilation provide guidance for anyone, in any stage of life, to grow as an individual.

To clarify, art, indescribable as it is I feel refers to any expression of creativity, while an artist can be anyone who is truly an individual, offering something unique in everything they do.

So much today we measure and weigh ourselves against others and from a young age, and are taught to do and think on the basis of approval from others. All the while neglecting to take time and learn what truly makes us happy as an individual. However, a feeling of happiness can be manufactured and obtained from any number of external sources. Perhaps not taking the time to learn what makes us complete is a more apt statement. What is it we must do, what do we need to do to feel complete as an individual, and resist becoming the appropriation of external pressures. Rilke suggests that the way to do this is to look into ourselves and find the thing that we would rather die if we were forbidden to do it. Once we find this, and know fully what makes us whole, can we know who we are as an individual and share that through our art.

Rilke’s commentary about love may be the most influential topic in his letters. When he discusses love, he is not strictly referring to romantic love, but I believe he is talking about anything that takes up an individual’s time and has expectations.  As he explains when a two people fall in love, “each of them looses themselves for the sake of the other”. Before jumping into any relationship (be it a person, career etc…) we must have grown into our individuality in solitude, otherwise we will be left with disappointment and unfulfillment.

Throughout Rilke’s ten letters, there is a reoccurring message; to encourage slow and deep learning through self-experience, unaltered by the thoughts and critiques of others and to not look for acknowledgment from anyone but oneself, “nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism”.

If there was one quote to summarize Rilke’s attitude towards art, I feel it would be this; “being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree”. Simply, the ripeness of the fruit does not depend on the age of the tree so much as what the tree has taken through its roots.

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