Rome
December 23, 1903
My dear Mr. Kappus,
I don't want you to be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.
And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by him? But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him - what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost?
Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? Must he not be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed?
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?
Dear Mr. Kappus, celebrate Christmas in this devout feeling, that perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.
And be glad and confident.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
我亲爱的Kappus先生：
我不希望您在耶酥受难节来临的时候里没有一丝我的问候，而您在这节日里，正忍受着比往日更加沉重的孤独。但是当您注意到这孤独的巨大时，您应该感到快乐；是什么能使孤独不那么巨大呢？只有一种孤独及其巨大、沉重和艰难是不能忍受的，几乎每个人都乐意以它去换取任何一种形式的社交生活，不管它有多么无聊或空虚；让那第一个来的人把渺小的外部世界给您，这最没有价值的……但是或许正是这些时光令孤独成长；它的成长正如男孩子们的成长一样痛苦，如春天的开始一样悲哀。
但是请不要为这些所迷惑。实际上真正必要的却是：孤独，巨大的内在孤独。走进您自己的心灵深处，独处几个小时--那时您一定有能力获得的。让自己孤独着，一如您童年的时候，那时成人们走来走去地忙着那些看起来很伟大很重要的事情，虽然他们对自己正忙着的事情并不真正理解。
当您认识到他们的活动是浅薄的时候，他们的职业已经僵化，不再和生活相关，而您也不再象儿时一样怀着崇敬的心情看待他们了，似乎您正在看着一些陌生的东西，它们远离您自己的世界，您感到了自己巨大的孤独，孤独的状态，还有浅薄？您想要放弃儿时用以抵抗和蔑视的智慧，为什么？原来无法沟通是一种走向孤独的途径，而抵抗和蔑视是参与的一部分，通过这些方式，您想要把自己隔绝开来。
想吧，亲爱的先生，想那在支持着您的内在世界，随便您将这种思想唤做什么：对自己童年的记忆，或对自己未来的向往--只要注意到您内在产生的东西就可以了，并把它置于您洞察到的一切事物之上。在您身体内发生的一切值得您付出全部的爱；有时您必须找到一种认识它的方法，而且在澄清您对人们的态度时不能丢失太多的时间或太多的勇气。是谁在说您有脾气？--我知道了，您的职业很难，许多东西在和您相抵触，我预见到您的悲伤并知道它将来临。现在它来了，我无法说些什么让您安心，或许只能这样劝您：所有的职业都是这样，充满了要求，充满了对个性的仇视，充满了那些发现自己不得不做平淡的工作而心怀恼怒的不平的人。您现在所处的情形是不要太受习俗、偏见和错误思想的束缚，如果有什么阻止您追求更大的自由，那些都是无关紧要的，就其本身而言没有一个是和组成最真实生活的重要事情有关。只有孤独的人被置于最深刻的律例之下，好比事物，当他走入正在曙光里或者望着活跃的夜晚的时候，当他感到有什么将要发生，但所有的事情都抛弃了他，好象离开一个死人，尽管他站在纯净的生活中间。
至于您，亲爱的开普斯先生，您现在所经历的就是不得不做一个公务员，您对它的感觉就象您在别的已有的职业里感到的一样；是的，抛开所有的情形不谈，如果您仅仅是讨厌去寻找和社会接触的简单而独立的方法，您也不会感受到那种被镶了边的感觉--这感觉到处都是；但是那并不是给焦急或悲哀寻找借口；如果您和别人没有什么可以分享的，试着和事物接近吧；他们不会抛弃您；夜晚会仍在那儿，风穿过树林和许多田地；这世界上的东西和动物的每一样都充满了巧合，而您可以参与进去；孩子们还是和您儿时一样是孩子，悲哀和快乐也没有什么不同--如果您想到了您的童年，您再次生活在童年，在孤独的孩子们中间，成年人什么也不是了，他们的尊严毫无价值。如果您在回想童年和率直天真的时候感到害怕和痛苦，并伴随着沉默，那是因为您无法再相信上帝，而他无处不在，然后您问自己，亲爱的开普斯先生，是否您真地丢失了上帝。当您说您从未拥有过他的时候是否这是真的？那是什么时候发生的事？您认为孩子能抓住他，成年人只有巨大的努力才能忍受他吗？还有，谁的重量粉碎了老年人？您认为真的拥有他的人会象丢掉一块石头一样地丢失他吗？或者您认为曾经拥有他的人会被他抛弃？--但是如果您认识到他在您的童年时不存在，在早先的时候不存在，如果您设想耶酥被他的渴望所盅惑而穆罕默德被他的骄傲所欺骗--如果是害怕因为至今您还没有感到他的存在，即使在我们现在谈起他的时刻--那么如果他根本不存在，什么能向您证明呢，是象错过了那些路过您身旁的其他人一样错过他，还是到处找寻他？
为什么您不认为他就要到来，他从永恒中向我们接近，总有一天他会到来，他是这棵树上的真正的果实，而我们是那树的叶子。是什么阻止您相信他真正诞生过呢？是什么阻止您相信您的生命是建立在一次痛苦、美丽而伟大的妊娠之上呢？不要以为每一件事情的发生都是一次一次的开始的重复，那不是他的开始，因为，就其本身来说，难道开始总是如此美丽的吗？如果他是最完美的一个，那比他逊色的一定不会在他之前产生，而使他能选择将自己的命运放在充实和富足之外--他一定不是最后一个，所以他能把所有的事情包容起来，如果我们期望的他已经存在了，这对我们又意味着什么呢？
如同蜜蜂收集花粉，我们也累积事物的美好一面并设计它。即使我们开始的时候微不足道，随着后来的工作和休息，随着寂静或一点孤独的快乐，随着我们独自完成的每一件事情，做的时候没有任何人参与和帮助，我们开始的时候是不会看到他的存在的，如同我们的祖先无法活着看到我们。他们，尽管很久以前就去世了，但是仍旧活在我们心中，如同先天性的，如同重担一样压在我们的命运之上，如缓缓流动的血液和从遥远的时光中打来的招呼。要是有一天您认为他曾经存在过，会有什么东西剥夺您的希望吗？那遥无边际的限制又是什么呢？
亲爱的开普斯先生，用这种虔诚的感情来庆祝耶酥吧，或许他需要您的这种极端苦闷的感觉来促成这个开始；您的这些过渡时光或许就是为他的到来做着准备，如同您童年时候秉住呼吸等候他。耐心些，坚强些，并了解：我们现在所做的，就象土地为春天的到来所做的一样。
祝快乐和自信。
您的，
瑞那.玛里亚.李尔克
罗马1903年12月23