RAINER MARIA RILKE

able, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and
to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a
new clarity : that is alone what living as an artist means: in
understanding as in creation.

There is no measuring by time there, a year there has no
meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means : not
to reckon and count ; to ripen like the tree which does not force
its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear
lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes
only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front
of them, so unconcernedly still and far. I am learning it daily,
learning it through pains to which I am grateful : patience is all !

Ricuarp DenMEL ?: I feel about his books (and incidentally
about the man too, whom I know slightly) that when I have
found one of his lovely pages I am always afraid of the one that
follows, which may ruin everything again and turn what is
charming into something unworthy. You have characterized
him quite well in the phrase “living and writing in heat”.—And
in point of fact artistic experience really lies so incredibly close
to sexual, to its agony and its ecstasy, that both phenomena are
actually only different forms of one and the same longing and
felicity. And if instead of heat one might speak of—sex, sex in
the large, wide, pure sense, without any slur of ecclesiastical
error, his art would be very great and infinitely important. His
poetic strength is great, and strong as a primitive impulse, it has
its own uncompromising rhythms within itself, and gushes out
as if from a mountain side.

But it seems that this strength is not always quite sincere and
without pose. (But that is just one of the most difficult tests with
a creator : he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of
his best virtues, if he does not want to deprive them of their
unselfconsciousness and integrity!) And then, when it comes
rushing through his being into sexuality, it finds there a man
not quite so pure as it required him to be. There it sees no

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