Via Reggio,
Near Pisa,
Italy,
April 5th,
1903.
You must pardon me,
My dear sir,
For only today gratefully remembering your letter of February 24th.
I have been unwell all this time.
No,
Not exactly ill,
But oppressed by an influenza-like debility that has made me incapable of doing anything.
And,
Finally,
As I simply did not get better,
I came to this southern sea,
The beneficence of which has helped me once before.
But I am not yet well.
Writing comes hard to me,
And so you must take these few lines for more.
Of course you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure,
And you must be indulgent with the answer,
Which will perhaps often leave you empty-handed,
For ultimately,
And precisely in the deepest and most important matters,
We are unspeakably alone.
Many things must happen.
Many things must go right.
A whole constellation of events must be fulfilled for one human being to successfully advise or help another.
Today,
I wanted to tell you just two more things.
Irony.
Do not let yourself be governed by it,
Especially not in uncreative moments.
When you are fully creative,
Try to use it as one more way to take hold of life.
Used purely,
It too is pure,
And one needn't be ashamed of it.
And if you feel you are getting too familiar with it,
If you fear this growing intimacy with it,
Then turn to great and serious objects,
Before which it becomes small and helpless.
Seek the depth of things.
There irony never descends,
And when you arrive at the edge of greatness,
Test out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your nature.
For under the influence of serious things,
Either it will fall from you,
If it is something fortuitous,
Or else,
If it really innately belongs to you,
It will strengthen into a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with.
The second thing I want to tell you today is this.
Of all my books,
I find only a few indispensable,
And two of them are always with me wherever I am.
They are here by my side,
The Bible,
And the books of the great Danish writer,
Jens Peter Jacobsen.
I wonder whether you know his works.
It is easy to find them,
Since some of them have been published in Rakhal's University Library in a very good translation.
Create yourself the little volume of six stories of J.
P.
Jacobsen and his novel,
Niels Lind,
And start with the first story in the former,
Called Mugens.
A world will come over you,
The happiness,
The abundance,
The incomprehensible vastness of a world.
Live a while in these books.
Learn from them what seems to you worth learning,
But above all,
Love them.
This love will be repaid to you a thousand and a thousand times,
And however your life may turn,
It will,
I am certain of it,
Run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences,
Disappointments,
And joys.
If I am to say from whom I have learned something about the nature of creative work,
About its depths and everlastingness,
There are but two names I can mention.
Jacobsen,
That great,
Great writer,
And Auguste Rodin,
The sculptor,
Who is without peer among all artists who are alive today.
All success upon your path.
Of course,
Rainer Maria Rilke.
