LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags
wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wake-
fulness and knowing. You are so young, you have not even
begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can,
to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms
and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search
now for the answers which cannot be given you because you
could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live
the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without
noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. Perhaps
indeed you carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and
forming, as a particularly pure and blessed kind of life ; train
-yourself for it—but take what comes in complete trust, if only
it comes from your will, from some inner need of yours, take
it to yourself and do not hate anything. Sex is difficult; yes.
But it is the difficult that is enjoined upon us, almost everything
serious is difficult,* and everything is serious. If you only
recognize that and contrive, yourself, out of your own dis-
position and nature, out of your experience and childhood and
strength to achieve an entirely individual relationship to sex
(not influenced by convention and custom), then you need no
longer fear to lose yourself and become unworthy of your best
possession.

Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or
the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it
is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of
the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our
acceptance of it is not bad ; what is bad is that almost all men
misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus
to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying
for the heights. Mankind have turned eating, too, into something
else : want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have
dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple neces-
sities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull. But

 

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