RAINER MARIA RILKE

IV

Temporarily at WorpswEDE '° near BREMEN,
July 16th 1903.

 

I left Paris about ten days ago, badly ailing and tired, and
came to a great northern plain, whose remoteness and silence
and sky are to make me well again. But I ran into a long spell
of rain, which has only today begun to clear a little over the
restlessly waving land; and I am using this first moment of
brightness to send you, dear Sir, my greetings.

My dear Herr Kappus: I have left a letter of yours long
unanswered, not that I had forgotten it—on the contrary: it
was of the kind that one reads again when one finds it among
other letters, and I recognized you in it as if you were close at
hand. It was the letter of May 2nd, and you doubtless remember
it. When I read it, as I do now, in the great stillness of this
faraway place, your beautiful concern for life moves me even
more than I experienced it in Paris, where everything has-a
different ring and dies away by reason of the monstrous noise
that makes all things tremble. Here, where a vast countryside
is around me, over which the winds come in from the seas, here
I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you
those questions and feelings which have a life of their own
within their depths ; for even the best men go astray with words,
when these are to express something very gentle and almost
unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be
left without some solution, if you hold to things similar to those
on which my eyes now take their recreation. If you hold to

Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that
scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into
something great and boundless; if you have this love for in-
significant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the
confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will
become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more

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