This essay was written by Julia Morgan, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
Dear Rilke,
I know you were born in 1875, and that you didn’t write Letters to a Young Poet to me. But I’m in need of some counsel, and, as I am a Young Poet as well, I was hoping you could piece together some thoughts for me, perhaps drawing from your letters. I have always admired both your poetry and advice. So, I thought I’d send you some thoughts I’ve been having lately. Hopefully that’s not too forward.
When I moved to Provo, it was 2020. I brought masks, my new sheets, and a sense of determined independence. I went home once a month, went on camping trips that I told my parents about weeks later, and reveled in the fact that no one cared what time I went to bed.
I went on a mission. I loved it, and yet I returned to Provo with a kind of hunger, yearning for school, music, freedom. My friends and I planned our own half marathon, I found myself a boyfriend, I went on study abroads. I applied for everything—grants, scholarships, programs. I lived and loved with everything I had.
And things changed so quickly. With multiple breakups (including my own), marriages, and graduations, in a few semesters I found myself standing in the wake of this period of wonderful chaos. My roommates, who were also my good friends, slowly moved their lives out of our apartment. The books disappeared from the shelves, and then the dishes, and then the food from the refrigerator. It was mid-August, and my contract was up. As I returned to move my own things, I sat in my car in the parking lot. I felt as if maybe, if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t have to remember it all. The nights spent on the couch, sleepless; the mornings I waited to leave my room until my roommates and their boyfriends left so I wouldn’t have to confront my singleness; the emptiness of my roommate’s bed.
Sometimes, that is how Provo feels to me. A place where, if I enter, I have to remember all that is no longer there. No matter how full my day is, it will always be missing certain people. It’s too full of memory—too many stories.
I tried being a stranger one Sunday. I attended a church service I don’t usually, on streets I don’t often walk, and tried to see them as a stranger would. Headphoneless, quiet. What if I were a tourist, looking for a service to attend on a Sunday? I looked at the trees and saw the way they bent and fluttered, I wondered where the van driving past was going, I let my feet crunch the leaves beneath them. I think I felt refreshed: Provo was no longer mine, and too much to hold, but a place to regard as a stranger.
But only two thirds through my walk, I forgot to be a stranger. Suddenly, memories spilled out of everything: a bike, and someone’s porch, the leaves on the ground. I started remembering:
Nights biking home at midnight from doing homework with a friend—one night in particular—quiet, pedaling along, I saw a group of laughing college-age students. I smiled. Suddenly, they were in front of me—and it was Izzy and Luka and someone else I don’t remember. I yelled a surprised “Hey!” And we exchanged a conversation that lasted as long as we could hear each other. I turned back around, biking alone into the dark, laughing aloud in the delightful pre-nostalgia of a serendipitous college town encounter.
Freshman year: a November evening spent scaring people on campus by hiding under the piles and piles of big, dry, autumn leaves. Kicking them (the leaves), jumping into them, throwing them into the air. Making fake Boomerangs, ones that I can still find in my camera roll.
Evenings at my friend’s parents’ house, making dinner in the warm light of the kitchen, people coming and going. Burning pizzas and watching lightning storms; washing endless dishes. Sharing leftovers and music, flirting with friends and lovers, splitting into side conversations, speaking French. Feeling maybe too lucky.
A summer evening spent biking down the Provo River trail where we joined children splashing in the river. Squealing in the cold, wading up to our knees, saying “let’s bring our swimsuits next time!” On the way back, walking, someone’s tire flat, sprinklers chasing us down the darkening concrete path.
Sitting on the barely-warm spring evening porch, four of us, chatting. Mina read us her piece on immigration, her contained thoughts, but soon it was all spilling out into anger and fear. We squished onto the couch, enveloping her. It was the kind of couch that was a little too old and sagging in the middle, so large that it swallowed you. We became a tangle of arms, bodies and tears, talking into the wee hours of the night.
Provo holds so much pain and love all at once. And it might be time to leave. But there’s a strange feeling in leaving, one that feels so lonely. Should I leave, and be lonely somewhere else? Or should I stay, and feel a different type of loneliness?
I want to be a lawyer, but sometimes I wonder if lawyers have time to feel the kind of love and joy I described above. I feel so stuck, like all decisions are wrong somehow. It almost feels as though it’s a question of what kind of loneliness I would prefer.
I’m sorry to have been so despondent in this letter! Hoping you’re well and that your book writing is continuing onward.
Yours,
Julia
My most dear [Julia]:
I have left one of your letters unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it is of the kind that, on finding it among other letters, one reads again, and I recognised your presence there as if you were close by. As I read it now, in the stillness of this vast landscape, I am moved even more by your beautiful anxiety about life than I was in Paris, where all sounds different, and fades into an excessive noise that makes things tremble. Here, where the immense countryside surrounds me, over which blows a wind from the sea, I feel that no one anywhere can reply to your questions and feelings which, in their depth, possess a life of their own; for even the finest words fail if they seek to articulate that which is quietest, and well-nigh unsayable. Yet I still believe that you need not remain without an answer if you trust to things like those which my eyes now rest upon. If you trust to Nature, to what is simple within Nature, the small things that scarcely anyone sees, which can so swiftly become vast and immeasurable; if you possess love for what is humble and, simply as one who serves, seek to gain the trust of what seems impoverished: then all will become easier for you, more consistent, and more filled for you with reconciliation, not in the conscious mind perhaps that remains amazed, but in your innermost awareness, awake and knowing.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I would beg you, dear madam, as best I can to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books penned in a language most foreign to you. Don’t search for answers now that cannot be given because you could not live them. And it is about living it all. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, at some distant point, without realising it, you will gradually come to live yourself into the answer. Perhaps you have the power to educate and create, within a particularly pure and blessed way of life; train yourself to do so – but accept with true confidence whatever comes, and as long as it comes of your own freewill, from some labour within yourself, take it upon yourself, and hate nothing.
So, my dear madam, love solitude, and endure the pain it brings with lovely sounds of lament. For those close to you seem far away, you write, and that shows the distance is growing around you. And if you seem far distant, your expanse of self is already among the stars and immense; rejoice in your growth, wherein you can take none with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be secure and calm before them, don’t torment them with your doubts or frighten them with your joy and confidence, which they could not comprehend. Seek some plain and simple common ground, that need not necessarily change, if you yourself change and change again; love the life in them, that other life, and be gentle towards those who grow old fearing the loneliness in which you trust.
It is good that you are entering a profession that will render you independent, that leaves you completely on your own in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your inner life feels constrained by the nature of this profession. I think it very difficult and demanding, since it is burdened by weighty conventions leaving almost no room for a personal interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a haven and home for you, even amidst the most alien circumstances, and you will find your path on which to emerge. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my trust lies in you.
Yours:
Rainer Maria Rilke
References
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. 1929. (The second letter is composed entirely of real words written by Rilke, abridged from Letters to a Young Poet. Minor changes such as “sir” to “madam” have been made.)
