It must become knowing, it must become critical. Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. In another letter from November of the following year, Rilke revisits the subject: Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes: In this thoroughly elevating modern classic, the beloved poet makes a beautiful case for the importance of living the questions, embracing uncertainty, and allowing for intuition. Jacqueline Novogratz’s wonderful commencement address reminded me of a favorite passage from Letters to a Young Poet ( public library) by Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926).
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