Reflections of a working writer and reader
If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. 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 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 only if it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet
Doris Lessing, who ended her formal schooling at age 13, has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She is the eleventh woman to be given this accolade in the 106 years since its inception.
Previous post: Myanmar (Burma) Today
Next post: A Writer’s Notebook II
Powered by eShop v.6
A wonderful tribute to the kind of untramelled creativity that can rise when people avoid schools.
jb says: Well, yes indeed, Ira. And it needs to be said.
well,she was nominated for nobel literature prize several time before and failed to achive but this time she got it,why she was not awarded the prize before is the question arising from my mind ,”Golden notebook” her magnum opus was written 40 years ago and the academy saw it now when the author is 87 ……..why and why ,