You must know, dear friend, how glad I was to have that lovely letter from you. The news you give me, real and tellable as it is, seems good to me, and the longer I have thought it over, the more I have felt it to be in fact good.
But I have thought of you often during these holidays and imagined how quiet you must be in your lonely fort among the empty hills, upon which those big northerly winds precipitate themselves as though they would devour them in great pieces.
The stillness must be immense, in which sounds and movements have much room, and where the far-off sea somehow comes chiming in. One can only wish for you that you are confidently and patiently letting that lofty solitude work upon you; this solitude in which everything ahead of you to experience will work as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, much as in us blood of ancestors ceaselessly stirs and mingles with our own into that unique, not repeatable being which at every turning of our life we are.
Art too is only a way of living and, however one lives one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real, one is closer to art than in the unreal and half-artistic professions which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art. I am glad, in a word, that you have surmounted the danger of falling into this sort of thing and are somewhere in a rough reality, being solitary and courageous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.
Ever yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
Paris, 1908
From Letters to A Young Poet
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