Rilke on the Relationship Between Solitude, Love, Sex, and Creativity – The Marginalian

“You are born alone. You die alone. The amount of space between trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her seventy-seventh year diary as she looked back on a long and comfortable life to consider the central role of solitude in creative work.

The generation before him, realizing that “works of art come from eternal solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) explored the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity in his dramatic novels with the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus – a budding poet and cadet at the same military school that nearly broke his young soul as Rilke.

Posthumously published in German, these books of unusually deep insight into the essence of art and love – that is, the essence of life – are now alive again as Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary (public library) the environmental philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and the poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows: two women who have lived at the most distant points of life – Macy was ninety-one at the time of translation and Barrows was seventy-three – and who have spent half a century thinking deeply about what makes life worthwhile for a man who lives long enough to live together in the work of translation. and who was in his twenties when he composed these letters of appreciation and timeless clarity.

Anticipating the light of twentieth-century psychology on why childhood's power of “fertile solitude” is essential to creativity, self-esteem, and healthy relationships later in life, Rilke writes to his young correspondent in the short, dark, lonely days just before the winter holidays:

What (you may ask yourself) is solitude without some dimension to it? Because there is only one, and it is big and not easy to carry. It comes almost every time you would be happy to replace it with any combination, no matter how restricted and cheap it is; exchanged with it to see how strong it is with the common, less suitable ones. But perhaps that is the very moment when solitude is ripe; its maturity can be painful like the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… All that is needed is this: solitude, great inner solitude. To go inside and not meet another person for hours – that's what one has to learn to find. Being alone as a child. As the adults were busy with things that seemed big and important because the adults seemed to be busy and you could not understand what they were doing.

Echoing Kierkegaard's timely insistence that “of all absurdities it seems the most stupid… to be busy” and Emerson's observation that “our haste and our complacency seem ridiculous” when we pause the social rush from which we try to escape, Rilke adds:

If one day someone realizes that their busyness is sad, their activities are frozen and cut off from life, why don't they continue to see like a child, see it as strange, see it in the depth of the personal world, the greatness of the individuality of a person, that is, in itself, work and position and calling?

And yet the essential, most beautiful tension of creation that Rilke reconciles in one way is the essential union between solitude and love – each enriches the other, each enhances the spiritual perfection that emerges from all art. In a letter written the following spring, he writes:

Don't let your loneliness obscure the presence of something within you that wants to emerge. Surely this presence will help your solitude to grow. People are drawn to the simple and easy side of simplicity. But it is clear that we must hold on to difficulties, as is the case with all living things. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and in every opposition, it tries within and at any cost to be different from itself. It is good to be alone, because being alone is difficult, and the fact that something is difficult must be the main reason for doing it.

Love is good too, because love is hard. For one person to care for another, perhaps that is the most difficult thing that is required of us, the greatest and final test, all other work is just preparation. With all our being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is a committed and permanent process.

Two decades before Kahlil Gibran offered his poetic wisdom about the difficult balance of intimacy and independence in true love, Rilke sought to free the ideological chains of our culture's view of love as a means of uniting associations. “No human experience is full of meetings like this,” he observes of those who have not made friends with their loneliness and instead “act out of helplessness” to “simply surrender to love as a way to escape loneliness.” He offers a liberating alternative that still calls for courage as unconventional in our day as it did in his:

To love is not to unite. It is a good invitation for a person to mature, to separate, to be a country to himself by responding to another. It is a great, unassuming calling that sets a person apart and calls them beyond boundaries. We can only use this sense of love that has been given to us. This is the work of mankind, which we are not yet ready for.

[…]

This extra human love (infinitely thoughtful and simple and beautiful and clear, perfected by holding close and letting go) will be like the love we are working so hard to prepare—a love that includes two protective solitudes, boundaries, and greetings.

In another book, Rilke adds the complexity of physical intimacy to this field of extreme difficulty, forming his advice on how best to use eros as a creative force:

Yes, sex is hard. But whatever is expected of us is difficult. Almost everything important is difficult, and everything is important… Come to your relationship with sex, without culture and routine. Then you don't have to be afraid of losing yourself and not being worthy of your better nature.

Sexual pleasure is an emotional experience, no different from pure sight or pure touch, like the taste of fruit. It is a vast, infinite thing that has been given to us, a natural part of knowing our world, of the fullness and brilliance of all consciousness. And we find nothing wrong. What is wrong is to misuse and abuse this experience and use it to please the tired aspects of our lives, to disperse rather than to connect.

Long before scientists discovered that primitive plant and animal sexuality gave our planet its beauty, Rilke adds:

Seeing the beauty of animals and plants is a form of love and longing; and we can see the animal, as we see the plant, patient and willing to meet and multiply – not because of the lust of the flesh, not because of suffering, but bowing to needs greater than passion and suffering and stronger than will and resistance.

O that men might humbly accept and earnestly bear this mystery which fills the world down to the smallest thing, and feel it as part of the sorrows of life, instead of taking it lightly. If only they would respect this seed, which is not separated, regardless of whether it is a spiritual or physical state. Because this spiritual intelligence comes from the flesh, from that sensuous mind, and it is the breathing, most delightful, eternally recurring spirit of sensuality.

So also the role of the erotic in the creative work:

Creative art is nothing but a great continuous participation and interaction of the real world, nothing but a thousand-fold harmony of living things; and the joy of the creator is thus indescribably rich because it contains memories of the birth and reproduction of millions. In one creative thought live a thousand forgotten nights of love, which include great love. And those who gather at night, locked in pushing desire, gather nectar, produce the power and sweetness of some poetic words that will sing the rapture.

To find out more and about this exciting new translation of Letters to a Young Poet — including Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska's vision of “that rare miracle when a translation ceases to be a translation and becomes… second to the original,” and the best such miracle in a classical language since Ursula K. Le Guin's feminist translation Tao Te Ching – enjoy this In life a conversation with Macy and Barrows about the wider resonance of Rilke's work in our world, then visit Rilke's contemporary Hermann Hesse on solitude and the courage to find oneself, Rilkean physicist Brian Greene on the way of life and our human vulnerability, and Rilke himself on what it takes to be an artist.