LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

he found that solitude was filled with the presence of God, and it
became more than ever a necessity for him. His very marriage
he regarded as an assurance of solitude ; soon after he set up
house at Westerwede he wrote to Paula Becker: “I hold this to
be the highest task for a union of two people : that one shall guard
the other’s solitude. For if it is the nature of indifference and of
the multitude to acknowledge no solitude, love and friendship
exists to give continually opportunity for solitude. The only real
communions are those which interrupt rhythmically profound
solitude™ (Letters 1899-1902, p. 167).

If he appreciated the value of extraordinary solitude as few
artists have done, it is possible that he underrated the value of
ordinary communion ; he enjoyed it well enough when it came
his way, and sometimes felt an almost morbid craving for it,
but it exhausted him. “ Among people, particularly those I love,
I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in con-
versation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid
piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability,
the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations,
in which one does not exert and expend oneself” (Letters
1906-1907, p. 118).

: NoTE 13, PAGE 24

The whole of the late autumn and winter of 1903, and the
spring of the following year, Rilke spent in Rome, greatly
perplexed about his art, feeling that he had not yet begun to
write, doubting his own ability as a craftsman in comparison
with Rodin (with whom he had broken). It was at Rome that
he began to write his Malte Laurids Brigge, which was not
finished for another seven years.

NOTE 14, PAGE 26

The word that Rilke uses to describe the lodging is Altan,
which signifies a high balcony. It was in point of fact “a little
red building on the arch of a bridge spanning the main pathway
of the garden [of a villa] . . . built years ago as a summer house,
it contains a single simple high windowed room and carries a
flat roof, from which one sees the Roman landscape afar”

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