patience is everything
Leave to your opinions their own quite undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patient the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything.
You are so young, so before all beginning, and 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. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it- but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own(not influenced by convention and custom), then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.
很久以来浮躁得没能认真看完一本书，今日看里尔克当年写给一个年轻诗人的信件集「给青年诗人的十封信」，越看越沉静下来了。不仅仅是因为文字的内容吸引了我，更是从中感觉到写作的人的心是如此谦逊，真诚，坚定，又广博。想到里尔克写这些文字时也就是二十多岁，有些思想和灵魂是能超越时间的。