LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

-~ of years of adaptation, become so similar to this life that when
we stay still we are, by a happy mimicry, hardly to be distin-
guished from our surroundings. We have no cause to be mis-
trustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors they
are our terrors; if it has abysses those abysses belong to us, if
dangers are there we must strive to love them. And if only we
regulate our life according to that principle which advises us
always to hold to the difficult, what even now appears most
alien to us will become most familiar and loyal. How could we
forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings
of every people; the myths of the dragons which are trans-
formed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the
dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us
once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at
bottom the helplessness that seeks our help.

So you must not be frightened, dear Herr Kappus, when a
sorrow rises up before you, greater than you have ever seen
before ; when a restlessness like light and cloud shadows passes
over your hands and over all your doing. You must think that
something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand ; it will not let you fall. Why do you
want to exclude any disturbance, any pain, any melancholy
from your life, since you do not know what these conditions
are working upon you: Why do you want to plague yourself
with the question where it has all come from and whither it is
tending ¢ Since you know that you are in a state of transition
and would wish nothing so dearly as to transform yourself. If
something in your proceedings is diseased, do reflect that disease
is the means by which an organism rids itself of a foreign body ;
you must then simply help it to be ill, to have its full disease
and to let it break out, for that is its development. In you, dear
Herr Kappus, so much is happening now ; you must be patient
like a sick man and sanguine like a convalescent; for perhaps
you are both. And more than that : you are also the doctor who
has to superintend yourself. But in every illness there are many

 

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