Live the Questions

Maria Popova’s Commentary About Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926). In this thoroughly elevating modern classic, the beloved poet makes a beautiful case for the importance of living the questions, embracing uncertainty, and allowing for intuition.

In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

In another letter from November of the following year, Rilke revisits the subject:

“Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.”

Additional Rainer Maria Rilke Poem with Commentary by Parker L. Palmer

Ah, not to be cut off
Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner-what is it?
if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Here’s a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that I find full of meaning—despite the fact that it’s one of the shortest poems I know. With highly distilled wisdom it reminds us that…
• We yearn “not to be cut off” from the source…
• Our inner lives are as vast and worthy of exploration as outer space…
• What we all seek is a sense that we’ve come home…
• Home is to be found “in here,” not somewhere “out there”…
• Our inner home is a place of beauty, “hurled through with birds and deep/with the winds of homecoming”…
And Rilke does it all in 39 words, about one-third of the number I used to write this post. Amazing!

—Parker J. Palmer (November 23rd, 2013).