[and so, it is, i awaken each night to haunt the midnight hours, and keeping me company of late, these words from my dear, good friend...i read his letters with a different vision now than i read them then. and realize, our greatest work of art is surrendering to the process of being undone to be made whole, and devoting ourselves to the gentle work of fashioning an honest, true, and real life].
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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.
Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every
such argumentation, discussion, introduction;
if you are wrong after all,
the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly
and with time to other insights.
Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development,
which, like all progress, must come from deep within
and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.
To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself,
in the dark,
in the inexpressible, the unconscious,
beyond the reach of one's own intelligence,
and await with deep humility and patience
the birth-hour of a new clarity;
in understanding as in creation.
There is here no measuring with time,
no year matters, and ten years are nothing.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting,
but ripening like the tree
which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring
without the fear that after them may come no summer.
It does come.
But it comes only to the patient,
who are there as though eternity lay before them,
so unconcernedly still and wide.
I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful;
patience is everything!
Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.
Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every
such argumentation, discussion, introduction;
if you are wrong after all,
the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly
and with time to other insights.
Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development,
which, like all progress, must come from deep within
and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.
To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself,
in the dark,
in the inexpressible, the unconscious,
beyond the reach of one's own intelligence,
and await with deep humility and patience
the birth-hour of a new clarity;
in understanding as in creation.
There is here no measuring with time,
no year matters, and ten years are nothing.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting,
but ripening like the tree
which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring
without the fear that after them may come no summer.
It does come.
But it comes only to the patient,
who are there as though eternity lay before them,
so unconcernedly still and wide.
I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful;
patience is everything!
- from "letters to a young poet"
rainer maria rilke -
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