Rilke for the Bad Bitch
When a friend first recommended poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” to me, I honestly put it to the back of my mind. Although I’m a shameless sucker for a little Rupi Kaur or Courtney Peppernell, poetry isn’t typically my thing and I also didn’t see why she thought whatever I was talking her ear off about could mean I’d be interested in nineteenth century German poetry. No hate towards that genre of course, I’m just not really sophisticated enough to appreciate a lot of older literature. But low and behold, some time passed, I was on a search for something new to read, and I got my hands on a copy.
Long story short, that incredible feeling soon followed. The one when you completely, unexpectedly find yourself sinking into a book, film, or artwork that you had no idea would resonate with you so much. Somehow, it felt like what I was reading was deeply comforting, while at the same time unexpected and brutally honest in a way that was scary, but more so enlightening. Having had since read a number of compilations and translations of Rilke’s many works, I found this idea fittingly conceptualized by editor Elruch Baer— “[Rilke] breathes deeply into the messiness of life that no one can avoid.”
Still, I look for new ways to connect with his writing. Moreover, for anyone who read it or any thing else that offers self-help style direction, maybe you can relate that it can be hard to take those ideas that you value and actually weave them into your mindset/life. Although I hate preachy self-help books actually, this is different I promise. Nonetheless, here I am compiling a little Rilke for the Bad Bitch. To cut to the point, out of all the winged eyeliner looks and Doja Cat songs that have made me feel empowered, Rilke’s words, out of everything, have somehow instilled in me the greatest Bad Bitch energy that I will now attempt to explore.
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“Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing: there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.”
I’ll begin with this quote because for me, it embodies many of Rilke’s philosophies in one passage. We’re all used to categorizing our experiences into bad or good. Times where we’re confused, sad, or alone we fear, try to avoid, or try to forget about. On the other hand of course, when things run smoothly, we finally feel positively about ourselves and desperately chase whatever it was that gave us that joy. Obviously, this is all very natural and can be good for us. However, Rilke stresses the importance and shows us the beauty in the confusing times, our sadness, and the mundane things in the world.
When it comes to confusion, he advises “to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even knowing it, live your way into the answer.” For me, this is the most empowering way to live. Harnessing a confidence that doesn’t come from having it all together or faking it till you make it— but one that stems from embracing the “lost" in it all. Because at the end of the day, life itself is heavy and its richness is also what can make it difficult.
In regards to sadness, Rilke highlights the solidarity component to sadness and life in general. I’m grossed out just as much as the next guy by the way he begins this excerpt: “Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone.” But while I do think it’s a bit extreme in the sense that I certainly have been helped by others, it’s true that in our saddest times we are often accompanied with feelings of loneliness and that fact isn’t going away. So why does he think this can be a good thing? He finishes- “This is not as bad as it may appear at first glance; it is also the best thing about life that everyone contains everything within himself: his fate, his future, his entire scope and world.” Yes, we have to face pressures and grow on our own, but that reality can also mean that we get to decide, encounter, and shape life in anyway we choose. Rilke reminds of the beauty in the agency that most of us have in our own lives.
In finding value in the mundane, we all know that we must “appreciate the little things” and “not take anything for granted”. But personally, these phrases have lost meaning and context over time. Rilke has given those approaches substance for me. He said, “If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable: if you have this love for what is humble… then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.” Specifically, this excerpt resonated with me in those last few words. Being told to “appreciate the little things” often comes with an idea that it will solve all of your problems and fill your life with rainbows and butterflies. But maybe we should just try to appreciate the small things in hopes of being enriched in a more subtle way— one that may subconsciously ground us and increase our awareness.
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Rilke and I will continue this bad bitch guide by highlighting some of his opinions on ~love~. Overarchingly, we see that not only does he view conventionally “bad” experiences as opportunities to grow, but he sees experiences that present themselves as positive, such as love, as “a high inducement for the individual to ripen”. He tells us that in the same way that it’s good to be in solitude, “it is good to love: because love is also difficult.” Even further, he holds, “for one human being to love another human being is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, for the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.”
Rilke emphasizes that rather than being ashamed or concerned in times that it is hard for us to love, we must understand that it is a giant learning experience, and if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so powerful and fruitful. However, in line with the aforementioned viewpoints, instead of leading us to believe that we need to simply “get through” the turbulent times, he looks at the difficult times as being important opportunities for us to grow— but not as a united couple as we may think in the traditional sense. He shows us what I believe is his most important lesson about love, “Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (to hearken and to hammer day and night), may young people use the love that is given to them.” You don’t have to go all softboi like I did and send this to someone during a breakup, but I believe it’s extremely powerful to be in love with an introspective eye. In that sense, no matter what happens, any love can be beneficial and positive.
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Last but not least, there’s nothing like anxiety to inhibit our confidence. But many of us know it’s not easy to simply stop overthinking or ignore our insecurities. So what if we can transform our anxiety? Rilke offers that “your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.” All too often we give power to our negative thoughts. Sometimes we forget that we don’t have to simply accept every doubt. Rilke sees a world where our deepest doubts and anxieties, with the proper confrontations, may actually help us more than anything else. Personally, I am very far from having that relationship with my anxiety but as pushing it away hasn’t proved to be helpful, I found this to be a very hopeful and enlightening possibility.
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Ultimately, it’s hard to determine if Rilke is overly optimistic or actually entirely the opposite. Despite his ability to see a potential for growth in challenging times, the force of Rilke’s letters results from his awareness that his life and “world,” in a profound sense, exceeded him. He believes the world “surpasses us” because “we make choices and form intensions that are wiped out simply by what happens; we take recourse to names and titles and seek happiness but all of those forms of refuge may prove transient.” This powerfully reminds us that it is in fact not a question of masting or subduing life, but of living it. Overall, if you’re intrigued by his writing, I only skimmed the surface. He offers thoughts about mindfulness, feminism, God, and more. Hopefully, something has resonated with you and if not, you continue to seek meaningful content that, no matter how unfamiliar, brings you closer to the strong, unafraid Bad Bitch you are.
Further Reading:
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke & M. D. Herter Norton
Letters on Life by by Rainer Maria Rilke & Ulrich Baer
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke & Stephen Mitchell
Rilke on Love by Rainer Maria Rilke and Ulrich Baer
Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman by Rainer Maria Rilke and Annemarie Kidder (Translator)
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“This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.
“If a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and could-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall”
“If we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience
Rainer Maria Rilke
Images By Nicole Pollack
