Interview with Rilke: Creativity requires solitude ✍️
Authenticity is the hallmark of a great artist, but it’s hard to be yourself when the outer world stifles your inner voice. The famous German-language poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, believed that solitude was the solution.
In the following dialogue, I talk to Rilke about creativity, solitude, and patience.
(If you want to read this in a browser, or share it, here's the link: https://dkb.show/post/creativity-requires-solitude)
DKB: I’ve been working on this blog for a few months now, and I’d love to get your feedback. Your writing is a beautiful work of art, and I want mine to be the same.
Rilke: You’re asking me for feedback on your writing, as I’m sure you’ve asked many others. And you’ve probably spent countless hours re-reading all of the comments you get.
I have to ask you to let all of that go.
You’re looking outside of yourself for the answers, and that’s the last place you’ll find them. The only way for you to move forward is to move inward.
Ask yourself the most important question of all: why do you feel the need to write in the first place? Investigate whether your reason for writing is rooted in the deepest region of your heart.
Ask yourself at the darkest hour of the night: must I write?
If your answer is yes, then you should redesign your life to align with this necessity.
Turn inwards and get in touch with your authentic self. If you’re able to write something in this state, it won’t even occur to you to ask anyone whether your writing is good or not. You won’t be focused on getting a positive reaction from the public, because in your writing you’ll see something that is authentically a piece of you – a reflection of your soul.
So my only advice to you is to go into the depths of your inner world, and at the source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write.
Perhaps it will turn out that you were called to be an artist. If that is your fate, then accept it and deal with it, the highs and the lows, the burden and the greatness, without ever worrying about external rewards.
DKB: That all sounded very poetic and beautiful, but to be honest, I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me.
Rilke: Inside you right now is a mix of the pressures of the external world, and your authentic self. If you want to create great art, then it has to be wholly you. The only way to untangle your true self from the sea of external influence is through solitude.
Solitude is what you need most, great inner loneliness.
DKB: It’s hard to find the time and space for solitude…but even if I could go to a cabin in the woods and have total solitude, I feel like it would be very challenging and unproductive.
Rilke: I didn’t say living in solitude would be easy. There will definitely be times when you find your solitude hard to bear. Everyone has moments when they would happily exchange solitude for some kind of company, even the most trivial and superficial social interactions, just for the illusion of connection with people they don’t resonate with at all.
But these are precisely the moments when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys, and sad like the beginning of spring.
You need to get back to the solitude that you knew as a child. Children haven’t been distorted by the forces of the external world yet. They see the world with eyes unclouded. They live in their own world, a world of pure authenticity.
DKB: I see what you’re saying, but human beings are social animals. It’s normal for us to care about what other people say, and to want some kind of external validation.
I agree that art should be authentic, but we also want to make something that matters to other people. So I don’t know if solitude is really the answer.
Rilke: If you go deeply into solitude, it will grow clearer to you that it’s not something you choose to do or not to do. Humans are fundamentally solitary. That is our nature. It’s possible for you to deceive yourself and act like this isn’t the case, but it would be a lot better for you to accept what you are.
If you take solitude as your starting point, it will be as if all the points that you are used to resting your eyes upon were taken away from you, and there was no longer anything close by, and everything was infinitely far away from you.
If you were transported from your room without warning to the top of a high mountain, you would feel something like it. You would be destroyed by an unparalleled sense of insecurity, and an exposure to something nameless.
DKB: That sounds pretty painful.
Rilke: It is, but like I said before, you shouldn’t let yourself be pulled out of your solitude just because something in you wants to escape from it.
People are used to taking the easy path, like electrons flowing through a wire, we’re attracted to the path of least resistance. But it’s clear that we must hold to the difficult if we really want to make progress.
This is what all living things do. Everything in nature grows and defends itself as a distinct creature with its own authentic way of life. Each creature strives to be itself in the face of all resistance.
DKB: Solitude sounds like a good way to grow as a person, but I don’t really care about that right now.
To bring this back to my original question, all I wanted to know was how to be a successful writer. I can focus on finding myself after I succeed.
Solitude isn’t going to make my writing any better, or help grow my audience. And of course I care if other people like my work, because that’s the whole point of being a creator!
So do you have any practical advice on how I can be a successful writer or not?
Rilke: I wish there was some secret shortcut, but I can’t give you what you want, only what you seem to need. Your style needs to have a quiet and untroubled development. This kind of progress must come from deep within, and cannot be forced or accelerated.
Everything must be carried to term before it is born. Let every impression and feeling come to completion inside you, in the dark and unseen unconscious, in what is unattainable to your own intellect. Wait in deep humility and patience for the moment when a new clarity is delivered to you.
That alone is to live like an artist.
Your artistic journey cannot be measured in time. No year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count, but to grow and ripen like the tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap, and stands at ease in the storms of spring without fearing that after there may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day, amid the hardships I am grateful for. Patience is everything.
You are so young. You have your whole life still ahead of you, so I have to ask you to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language.
Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future.
DKB: I’m really sorry for that outburst.
There’s so much pressure to succeed as fast as possible these days. It’s all about getting quick results, not spending years figuring yourself out and making authentic art.
I guess I was asking the wrong questions.
I’m so caught up in external rewards: likes, upvotes, and subscribers. Maybe I do need some of that solitude after all, so I can stop focusing so much on appearing successful to other people.
Anyway, we’ve been talking for a while, and you’ve already given me a lot to think about, so I’ll end it here. Do you have anything else you wanted to add before we go?
Rilke: We shouldn’t forget those ancient myths found at the beginning of all peoples. The myths about the dragons who at the last moment turn into princesses.
Perhaps all of the dragons in our lives are princesses, only waiting for the day they will see us handsome and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
I don’t think there’s much more for me to say about your issues. I hope you can find enough patience in you to endure. I hope that you can gain more trust in what is hard, and in your own loneliness among other people.
Other than that, I hope you let life take its course. Life is always right, whatever happens.
May the year to come maintain and strengthen you.
All the best, my dear friend.
If you made it all the way to the end, send me a message and let me know what you thought of it. Rilke may disapprove, but I still like feedback.
Also, I'm going to be trying to post an interview a week for the next month, which will be an interesting challenge. So hopefully you'll see more of me in your inbox 🤠.
much love,
dkb