Messages to a young poet

Do not think that the one who tries to comfort you now with his simple and calm words, which sometimes bring you comfort and joy; lives among them without distress. His life is full of distress and sadness, a different kind of distress from what you are going through, and if his life were not like that; he would not have been able to find those words. Reiner Maria Rilke "The words in Rilke's letters are living words, in the sense we sometimes speak of a living experience. Every word in his letters; it is considered that he passed through it and submitted to it, and certainly suffered through it. And every word he wrote leads us back to life, placing the writer and his readers inside the broadest circles that do not know what lies outside or behind them or what is greater than them." Ursula Christian Bayer "One of the most prominent points that can be indicated in this context is the idea of the inevitable necessity of writing for the writer to the extent that the lack of writing is linked to death, which was embodied in Rilke's question that he asks the young poet Kaboos to direct to himself: 'Will you die if you are deprived of it?', and here the conscience refers to writing." Writing for Rilke, then, is not a luxury or a fleeting desire or a whim that quickly extinguishes, but it is an equation of existence itself, to the extent that existence ceases with its absence.