May I offer to you these lines by Rilke, a hymn to living a full and long life, and to poetry, inciting us all to go out there and do it:
“To write a poem, it isn’t enough just to have memories.
Well, that is, poems don’t really amount to much if you write them too early in your life. You would do better to wait and to gather all the sensations and all the sweetness of a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences.
For the sake of a single poem, you have to have seen many cities, known many people and many things, you must understand animals, and feel how birds take wing and fly, and observe the delicate gestures that tiny flowers make when they open up in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in forgotten neighborhoods, back to unexpected encounters, and then to the inevitable partings that you had long seen coming; back to days of childhood whose mysterious pain still remains present and unexplained, to your parents whom you must have hurt even when they brought you a gift and you just didn’t understand (perhaps that was to be a joy for someone else); back to those childhood illnesses creeping up so strangely with so many questions and difficult transformations, and back to long days spent in a silent, dimly lit room.
Back to early mornings spent by the sea, watching the sea itself, calling to mind all the oceans, and endless nights of travel that somehow rushed along, soaring high overhead, illuminating all the stars in the sky, — and yet, it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You have to have memories of countless nights of love, each one different from all the others; and memories of women screaming in labor, and of pale girls who have just given birth, and are now sleeping.
But you must also have stayed alongside someone who is dying, to have remained alone with the dead in a room with just an open window and life going on outside.
And yet it is not enough just to have memories. You must be able to forget them when there are so many, and you must then have the immense patience to wait, until they return.
For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have become part of your very blood, transformed into a glance or a gesture, and have become nameless, no longer to be distinguishable from yourself — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem might perhaps arise in the midst of your memories and spring forth from them.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” my translation, December 2019
The large screen behind me is by Armand Albert Rateau, made in Paris in 1921 of lacquered and gilded wood, for the apartment of Jeanne Lanvin. Donated to the collection of the Musée des Beaux-arts, Paris, by the Prince de Polignac in 1965. Photo Jacques Chuilon