RAINER MARIA RILKE

and knew that it would come. Now it has come I cannot appease
it, I can only advise you to consider whether all professions are
not like that, full of demands, full of hostility against the indi-
vidual, saturated so to say with the hatred of those who have
reconciled themselves mutely and morosely to their own insipid
duty. The situation in which you now have to live is no more
heavily burdened with convention, prejudice and error than all
the other situations, and if there are some which make parade
of a greater freedom, there is certainly none which is in itself
wide and spacious and related to the great things of which real
life consists. Only the individual who is solitary is brought like
a thing 1 under the deep laws, and when a man steps out into
the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening
that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to
pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man,

. although he is standing in the midst of sheer life! What you
now, dear Herr Kappus, have to experience as an officer, you
would have felt similarly in every profession that exists, even
if you had sought only easy and independent contacts in society,
apart from any occupation, this oppressive feeling would not
have been spared you. It is the same everywhere ; but that is no
reason for anxiety or depression; if there is no communion
between other people and yourself, try to be near things, which
will not desert you ; the nights are still there, and the winds that
go through the trees and over many lands; among things and
with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which
you may take a part; and the children are still as you were in
childhood, as sad and happy—and when you think of your
childhood you are living among them again, among the solitary
children, and the grown-ups are nothing, and thc1r dignity has
no worth.

And if it dismays and torments you to think of childhood and
of the simplicity and stillness that goes with it, because you can
no longer believe in God who is to be met with everywhere
there, ask yourself, dear Herr Kappus, whether you have after

28