It is amazing how a few hours can change your thought process. I'd planned to type this post last night (it was churning in my head for a long while now) with the title I would have been mason or carpenter discussing the blurb of a slim book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke that goes like:
Go within and scale the depth of your being from which your life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analysing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without.
I had planned to write how I would been a mason or a carpenter (who works as diligently as a painter or a writer towards his craft without giving much thought to the world around him) instead of struggling to be a writer, a choice I always think is compelled by my physical limitations. But, a short visit to the hospital yesterday (29th Dec'10) and completing the book in single sitting this evening (30th Dec'10) changed the form of this post.
This book is not merely an advice or encouragement to a young poet from a senior fellow as the title suggests. But, it dwells on the mysteries of life like any good book should; from creativity to love to sex to God, it covers many topics but, its main focus is on solitude, aloneness or loneliness of a creative soul; apathy of the world towards a creative soul to be precise (that is what I could gather). In the modern world I doubt that such experience would be limited to creative people alone, even a corporate honcho, a lawyer or a medical professional would be experiencing such apathy.
Even though I found this whole book to be a big quotable quote. Still there are a couple of nuggets worth sharing:
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Even more inexpressible are works of art; mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure.
For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.
Wishing you all a happy and fruitful 2011.
Go within and scale the depth of your being from which your life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analysing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without.
I had planned to write how I would been a mason or a carpenter (who works as diligently as a painter or a writer towards his craft without giving much thought to the world around him) instead of struggling to be a writer, a choice I always think is compelled by my physical limitations. But, a short visit to the hospital yesterday (29th Dec'10) and completing the book in single sitting this evening (30th Dec'10) changed the form of this post.
This book is not merely an advice or encouragement to a young poet from a senior fellow as the title suggests. But, it dwells on the mysteries of life like any good book should; from creativity to love to sex to God, it covers many topics but, its main focus is on solitude, aloneness or loneliness of a creative soul; apathy of the world towards a creative soul to be precise (that is what I could gather). In the modern world I doubt that such experience would be limited to creative people alone, even a corporate honcho, a lawyer or a medical professional would be experiencing such apathy.
Even though I found this whole book to be a big quotable quote. Still there are a couple of nuggets worth sharing:
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Even more inexpressible are works of art; mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure.
For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.
Wishing you all a happy and fruitful 2011.
