Who is a writer? If we were to ask that question of the poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, the answer would be something like this: \u201cIf one feels one can live without writing, then one shouldn\u2019t write at all.\u201d With this radical passage from his letter, dated February 17, 1903, from Paris, Rilke attempts to answer the vocational questions of Mr. Franz Xaver Kappus, the fortunate recipient of more than five years of correspondence with the writer, letters collected in the emblematic work: \u201cLetters to a Young Poet.\u201d In them, the young Kappus asks Rilke for his opinion on his own poems and seeks his advice on whether or not he should abandon his military career to pursue his passion for poetry.<\/p>\n
For some reason I can't explain, in May of this year, right after my birthday, I felt a great need to reread that book, and I did so with such fervor that I couldn't stop until I'd read it twice, one after the other. I suppose there's no need to explain why we repeat something that brings such pleasure, but, moreover, I'm convinced that people and books seek each other out, and books always arrive at the opportune moment for each life they touch. In this way, everyone is always certain that the book they read was exactly the one they needed to read. And since we adults are experts at silencing our passions and exchanging our dreams for work, it's possible that I had to reread the book to remind myself that I always, always wanted to write. Not just someone else's speeches or other people's memoirs of some process; I wanted to write about things that matter fundamentally to me.<\/p>\n
After reading it, the book struck me once again as so splendidly beautiful, pure, and moving that I felt the need to discuss it with someone. So, searching my thoughts for someone who could offer an honest reading and share their assessment, I had the idea of \u200b\u200blending the book to one of my dearest professors, with whom I had the pleasure of warmly discussing it over several afternoons last summer. Thank you so much, Professor Luis Federico Santana!<\/p>\n
Then, I returned to New York and turned to the book on nights and mornings when I had an urgent need for some inspiration, something like when you need a thought that transcends your own and breaks the routine. Reading another part of the work, where Rilke seems to grant, fortunately for me, an involuntary pardon for that abandonment of our deepest aspirations into which we sometimes fall, by asserting that in art: \u201ctime cannot be measured. One year has no value and ten years are nothing\u2026,\u201d I returned to old writings, and although I haven't decided their final destination, they have already served to ignite some of those lights that we tend to extinguish when, lacking inspiration and short of internal stimulation, we turn to routine work and forget that we are creative, expansive, and limitless beings.<\/p>\n
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\u00bfQui\u00e9n es un escritor? Si le hici\u00e9ramos esa pregunta al poeta y novelista Rainer Mar\u00eda Rilke, la respuesta ser\u00eda m\u00e1s o menos esta: \u201csi uno siente que puede vivir sin escribir, entonces no deber\u00eda escribir en lo absoluto\u201d. Con ese radical pasaje de su carta estampada en Par\u00eds, el 17 de febrero de 1903, Rilke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4576,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions\/4576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firmaescribanos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}