RAINER MARIA RILKE

days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what
you, in so far as you are your own doctor, must now above all
things do.

Do not observe yourself too closely. Do not draw too rapid
conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to
you. Otherwise you will too easily reach the point of looking
reproachfully (that is morally) at your past, which is naturally
concerned with everything that is now occurring to you. But
what is taking effect in you from the mistakes, desires and
longings of your boyhood is not what you recall and condemn.
The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless child-
hood are so difficult, so complicated, exposed to so many
influences and at the same time so untrammelled by all real
connection with life, that where a vice appears in it we must
not call it a vice and leave it at that. One must in general be so
careful with names ; it is so often the name of a misdeed upon
which a life is shattered, not the nameless and personal action
itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life
and could be taken on by it without trouble. And the expense
of energy seems to you so great only because you overrate the
victory ; this latter is not the “great thing” that you think you
have achieved, although you are right about your feeling ; the
great thing is that something was already there which you could
set in place of that betrayal, something true and genuine. Apart
from this even your victory would have been only a moral
reaction without great significance, but thus it has become a
chapter of your life. Of your life, dear Herr Kappus, about
which I am thinking with so many wishes. Do you remember
how this life has longed ever since childhood for the “great™ :
I see how it is now longing to leave the great for greater. There-
fore it does not cease to be difficult, but therefore it will not
cease, either, to grow.

And if I may say one thing more to you, it is this: do not
think that the man who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled
among the simple and quiet words which sometimes do you

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