Leaves collect on the backroads. And while autumn is my preferred season I’m feeling melancholic about its early arrival. These lovely cool evening breezes are the prelude to long winter and the trees may be tired but they’re still bushy and full and offer refuge from the afternoon sun and yesterday we gathered with friends around a campfire at the beach and swam and feasted on steak and homegrown peaches and it’s not easy watching today disappear into yesterday disappear disappear disappear like sand through fingers no I’m not quite ready for memories but sun clings lovely lovely to cold morning dew and I walk through it barefoot and the sun has been magnificent lately splendid rays over drying dying corn days. 

Yes autumn has come early but it’s afternoon now and I’m in the shade of a maple tree with a pleasant breeze and wearing jeans but barefoot and I’m quite comfortable and I’m dreaming a bit of the things I’d like to do with my small parcel of land this piece of paradise that is not on the water that isn’t hidden a mile down a wooded lane or other such perfection no it is wonderful enough and I think a larger vegetable garden would be nice and more fruit trees and more seclusion with a stone wall yes something to hide behind to be myself behind and I spoke with my wife yesterday after the campfire we had with friends and we agreed how nice it was to be oneself among others and I thought how rarely I’m myself among others and I thought about the three faces the first face for the public society strangers the second face for close family and friends the third face the true self hidden from everyone experienced only in solitude and I think the face I wear alone should be the one face. Not that I’ve the desire to share it but the other faces exhaust me they are a waste of time and I’ve no time to waste and why wear them like uncomfortable clothes that I shed as soon as I’m back home… But the stone wall for privacy… my energy cannot extend infinitely the wall may not only be about keeping the outside from the inside and the inside from the outside no the wall is like the edge of the canvas yes and inside this canvas I’ve got the poultry yard and the weeping cherry trees and giggling little girls chasing one another naked with the garden hose and the flower patch and bird houses and evergreens and writing shed with the wood stove and soon very soon the meadow will be in bloom with frost asters. And my little A. is sitting on a blanket on the grass beneath another blanket spread over two chairs a fort for practicing her letters while I take shade beneath the the maple yes the two of us outside together in the September breeze both writing our letters and my oh my isn’t the sunshine beautiful now? And here comes my little A. she’s bored with her letters and she’s called to me and I’ve looked up and 

Yes, it could begin here in this place that is like a restaurant but isn’t quite a restaurant this place that breathes quietly yes quietly breathing the compressed air the conditioned air inhaling and exhaling in the quiet room without the staff, who will appear mid-week, without the dinner guests, who will appear at week’s end, yes it could begin here in this place that is quietly breathing and creaking and I wish it would stay this way for a while longer and, in fact, I would say yes to a few more days like this or a week of days like this. Or yes it could begin in this Time late summer the first days of September hot days cool nights the tired garden spindly herbs and stubby cucumbers and peppers ripening and the harvesting of pole beans and the melons dripping syrup down chins after dinner as the summer evening sun casts gold on hills of undulating tasseled corn. Yes it could begin here in this ponderous way. And it wouldn’t be a lie and there would be depth because the summer sun is true and the corn is true and the sweet melon is true and the restaurant that isn’t quite a restaurant is true yes it is romantic when the golden hour hits the fields and river banks in its waxing way but where else would the sun rest its rays? And it could begin here with all this painted language it is true and true and true but there is a darkness beneath it all and the darkness tires people it tires me but the great light casts the great shadow and I feel that in me yes it is in me great light and great dark and I feel it around me the great light that makes all the pretty things and the great dark that is the work inside them yes and that is where it will begin.

Paris, February 17th 1903

Dear Sir,

Your letter reached me only a few days ago. I want to thank you for its great and welcome trust. I can hardly say more. I cannot go into the quality of your verses; for I am too far removed from every kind of critical intention. In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism: the invariable result is more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away. 

Having written this note by way of introduction, may I just go on to tell you that your verses have no individual quality, but rather, quiet and hidden tendencies to something personal. I feel this is most clearly in the last poem My Soul. And in the beautiful poem To Leopardi there is perhaps growing up a kind of relationship with that great and solitary man. All the same, the poems are not yet anything in themselves, nothing independent, not even the last one or the one to Leopardi. Your friendly letter which accompanied them did not fail to explain to me a number of deficiencies which I felt in reading your verses, without however being able to give a name to them. 

You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and you are troubled when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (as you have permitted me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that begs you write. Examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must’ then build your life according to this necessity; your life must, right to its most unimportant and insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, as if you were one of the first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are too familiar and usual: they are the most difficult, for great and fully matured strength is needed to make an individual contribution where good and in part brilliant traditions exist in plenty. Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your own everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty—depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls allowed none of the sounds of the world to reach your senses—would you not still have always your childhood, that precious, royal richness, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention there. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that distant past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will extend itself and will become a twilit dwelling which the noise of others passes by in the distance. —And if from this turning inwards from this sinking into your private world, there comes verses, you will not think to ask anyone whether they are good verses. You will not attempt, either, to interest journals in these worlds: for you will see in them your own dear genuine possession, a portion and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has grown our of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds, without enquiring too closely into every word. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself. 

Perhaps however, after this descent into yourself and into your aloneness, you will have to renounce your claim to become a poet; (it is sufficient, as I have said, to feel that one could live without writing, in order not to venture it at all.) But even then this introversion which I beg of you has not been in vain. Your life will at all events find thenceforward its individual paths; and that they may be good and rich and far reaching I wish for your mote than I can say. 

What more shall I say to you? Everything seems to me to have its proper emphasis; I would finally just like to advice you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer…

With every respect and sympathy:

Rainer Maria Rilke. 

Corn and soy and rye mark the seasons. Sprouts to harvest to fallow fields it is easy to drive past without taking notice the familiar landscape and feelings and places and people and things move in us toward an entropy of consciousness yes we stop looking and feeling and noticing. I prefer not to stop noticing. As the corn dries in the September fields… The English ivy and kudzu high on utility poles. They’re mowing the roadsides… tucking them in early. I doubt the mowers will return before the cold scrapes its sharp nails over the hardened land. The cold that frees the body that frees the mind. Spring brought excitement for new life but toward summer’s end Mama’s embrace turns to clench clutch vise and death-grip it chokes and chokes and chokes until it begins to die and I am beginning to see her bones on weeping cherry trees on apple mint on tomato vines. 

How many times have I written on corn and soy and tomatoes and… yet within me they remain new. What do I know of nature? Almost nothing. I don’t need some other place. The corn stalk never produces the same ear twice. That is enough for me. And you? I don’t go further than the cornfield. Lurking beyond is just another man’s war. I return to the old bumpy road splitting thousands of acres of farmland… I duck my head into the rows of corn. I discover something new. I discover something that should not have been forgotten.