For Rilke, love is two solitudes protecting each other. It is not about merging or losing yourself. It is about two people standing so firmly in their own truth that they can look across the distance between them and say, “I see you.”
But it will give you something better: Permission.
Our world moves at the speed of a click. Rilke’s world moved at the speed of sap rising in a tree. He writes: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign tongue.” He tells Kappus that he is trying to answer questions too early. You cannot force the answers any more than you can force a tree to blossom in December. The task is not to find the solution tonight. The task is to live the question until you grow into the answer.
So, if you are a young poet—or simply a young human—put down the phone tonight. Pick up this tiny blue book. And let Rilke walk you home to yourself. cartas a un joven poeta rainer maria rilke
What Rilke Knew About Loneliness (That We’ve Forgotten)
Written between 1903 and 1908, these ten letters are not really about poetry. They are about how to live.
He warns that young people usually throw themselves at each other to avoid facing their own loneliness. But that isn't love; that is distraction. Real love is difficult. It asks you to become a whole person first. For Rilke, love is two solitudes protecting each other
If you are feeling lost, overwhelmed by the news, or simply stuck in the performance of adulthood, here is why this 120-year-old book still stings.
He tells the young poet to stop looking outward for validation. Don’t look for God in the church, don’t look for art in the galleries, and don't look for love in the mirror of another person just yet. Look at the boring, mundane, difficult things right in front of you.
The young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, was a 19-year-old military cadet. He felt trapped by uniforms, drills, and the suffocating expectations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He sent Rilke his poems, hoping for technical advice on rhyme or meter. Instead, Rilke performed a kind of surgery on his soul. Our world moves at the speed of a click
We spend billions of dollars a year trying to escape loneliness. We scroll, we date frantically, we work late, we numb. Rilke says: Stop running. “Love your loneliness and bear the pain it causes you with a simple, soft song.” He understood that loneliness is the price of originality. If you are always surrounded by the noise of the crowd, you can only ever think the crowd’s thoughts. The artist—and by extension, anyone trying to live an authentic life—must guard their solitude like a fragile animal.
Permission to be slow. Permission to be unsure. Permission to be lonely without being broken. Permission to trust that the ache you feel is not a sign that you are doing life wrong, but that you are, perhaps for the first time, doing it right.
Letters to a Young Poet is not a self-help book. It won't give you ten steps to happiness. In fact, it might make you more uncomfortable with the shallowness of your daily life.
He isn't romanticizing misery. He is saying that the voice you need to listen to is the one that only speaks when you are alone.