an unfinished opinion
Dear friend (or future me),
It’s cloudy this morning, which after weeks of heat feels like a favour from somebody. It’s a little humid, but bearable. I’ve brought my tea out to the step and forgotten it, so it sits cold beside me, and I drink it anyway.
I keep promising to tell you about Letters to a Young Poet, and I keep waiting until I have a proper opinion of it. I don’t have one yet. It’s short, just ten letters from a poet not much older than the one he was writing to, and I think I’ll be absorbing it for years.
The young man had sent Rilke some of his poems and asked whether they were any good. Rilke was twenty-seven, still becoming the poet we know today, and he declined to answer. He wrote back that no one could advise him, that the only way was inward. He told him to ask himself whether he must write, whether the need reached down to the roots of his life, and if the answer was a plain, strong yes, to build his whole life around it.
I read that and had to put the book down. For a long time I made things to see how I measured up. Every finished piece became a messenger pigeon with a note on its leg, and every one of them flew straight back to me with the verdict. Good. Not good. Keep going. Stop. You know how it is in our line of work, where there is always a review, a metric, a room of faces deciding. It’s true of the work I make for myself, too. There I’m the only critic in the room, and not a kind one. Perfectionism, to put it politely. But that’s not the point of this letter.
Rilke is wary of critics anyway: he says criticism is the least useful way to approach a work of art, and that only love can judge one fairly. So now, when the critic starts up, I ask a version of Rilke’s question instead: would I miss this if it were gone? Mostly the answer is yes. It’s the same answer for the thing I’m paid to make, and the thing I make just to keep myself busy.
Rilke has a patient answer for the urge to polish first. He says the maker is like a tree that doesn’t hurry its growth, that stands calm in the storms of spring without fearing summer won’t come.
He asks us to be patient with whatever is unresolved in us, to love the questions themselves, and to live into the answers slowly. (It’s my favourite line in the book.) I don’t have a verdict on the book, I have an unfinished opinion, and I’m sending it anyway, which may be the point.
I also didn’t expect a book about solitude to have so much to say about friendship. But the more I read, the more it seems that for Rilke, solitude is how you prepare to meet other people. I take that to mean you can’t really show up for someone until you’ve spent time with yourself. Knowing your own mind is what lets you meet someone else’s.
That’s why, for him, closeness is not about erasing the distance completely. Two friends are best thought of as two solitudes who border, protect, and greet one another.
The book itself shows this. A young man with a question, and a poet not much older who hands it back. Neither seems to ask the other to be finished. Maybe that’s why I could send you this unfinished.
Write back when you can, and not before you want to. The silence between us has never been the kind that needs repairing.
Yours from the edge of the morning,
Anith
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