Orts #748
from Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of ts origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other.
— letter One, February 17, 1903
. . . at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone.
— letter Two, April 5, 1903
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
— letter Three, April 23, 1903
. . . they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.
— letter Four, July 16, 1903
Rome . . . has an oppressingly sad effect for the first few days: through the lifeless and doleful museum atmosphere it exhales, through the abundance of its pasts, fetched-forth and laboriously upheld pasts . . ., through the immense overestimation, sustained by savants and philologists and copied by the average traveler in Italy, of all these disfigured and dilapidated things, which at bottom are after all no more than chance remains of another time and of a life that is not and must not be ours.
— letter Five, October 29, 1903
The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. . . . the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings.
— letter Six, December 3, 1903
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more confidently, must surely have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than easygoing man, who is not pulled down below the surface of life by the weight of any fruit of his body, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves.
— letter Seven, May 14, 1904
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, . . . perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
— letter Eight, August 12, 1904
. . . all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
— letter Nine, November 4, 1904
To A Young Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)
Time cannot break the bird’s wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together
Go down, one feather.
No thing that ever flew,
Not the lark, not you,
Can die as others do.