Solitary.

Can Rilke change your life?

In Rilke’s first letter, when he asked Kappus to contemplate whether he would die if he could not write, it sounded like a thought experiment. Nine months later, Kappus was telling Rilke that self-destruction had been a very literal possibility. Knowing this, Rilke’s advice can sound astonishingly unfeeling, even reckless, in its dogmatic insistence. “Almost everyone has moments when they would so much rather trade [loneliness] for a feeling of community,” he wrote. “But maybe these are precisely the moments when loneliness grows, for its growing is painful, like a boy’s, and sad, like the start of spring. Don’t let that fool you. What we need, after all, is only: solitude, a vast inner solitude.”

Rilke wrote this letter in late 1903, from a cottage at the Villa Strohl-Fern, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of Rome. There, according to his biographer Ralph Freedman, “Rilke became more and more of a recluse.” His wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, had her own cottage at the villa; the two maintained their distance. The “vast inner solitude” that Rilke urged on Kappus was not, in other words, something to which he had been resigned but instead a life that he had carefully cultivated. It was among the preconditions that allowed Rilke to break loose from a brief period of artistic stagnation and write “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” That poem’s hero, as in the Ovidian myth, is granted passage, by the beauty of his singing, to the underworld to retrieve his dead lover. Looking back at her on their ascent—giving in to his desire for companionship—would make her vanish. Worse yet, Rilke seems to imply, it would spoil his song.

Kappus did not know if he was truly a poet, but his correspondence with Rilke could make his lonely life feel like poetry. Receiving these letters, Kappus wrote, felt like being summoned into another world: “When I think that all these unsayable, marvelous, beautiful things you’ve entrusted to me are meant for me alone—that you find me worthy of sharing in these riches, meant only for the few, the solitary—I feel very proud.” There’s a magical kind of logic at work here, whereby receiving Rilke’s attention somehow also confers the glowing light of his art. To be included within the reaches of someone else’s fame was to reconsider the boundaries of the self: Kappus’s future might have been unknown, but he no longer was.

Did Rilke and Kappus’s correspondence really create such a connection? “Writing letters,” Franz Kafka once complained (in a letter) to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and the object of his tortured love, “is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.” In a letter, a version of yourself has to be pinned to the paper, made into something that can fit inside an envelope. Because of the inevitable delays of the mail, the self that finally reaches its recipient will bear only a spectral relation to the self that you have meanwhile become. And when their letter arrives, in response to yours, the lags compound. Ghosts commingle in the mail, and all the while actual correspondents remain painfully out of touch.

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