I’ve recently been reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters to a young poet. I’m a certain fan of Rilke’s poetry. There is something very, dare I say, good, about it. His letters are interesting, too, and I’ve been dragging a lot of words out of them that I want to sit on for a while. There’s a lot that interests me and has really made me think about my own relationship to art and experiences. The whole of it, as always, is marked by the general opinion that to be an artist is to be alone. That it’s a painfully solitary sort of experience.

I think the artist, tortured soul, agonizingly lonely, is a foolish sort of concept. A weak excuse for loneliness by claiming it is, by and large, an only path to greatness. I also think it isn’t unique to the artist. We all seek an excuse for our loneliness. A justification for why it seems we are uniquely alone against the world, something like greatness, to avoid alternatives, spirals of believing that there must, then, be something in us which is uniquely wrong, some personal failing so severe and inescapable that we, by extension, must always exist alone. That there can’t be a form of us that isn’t lonely.

Wouldn’t it be better? To say that you must embark on the solitary path in order to become great? Then, that way, it’s not so much a failing. You’re choosing to be alone, even. A divine calling, a choice which must, bravely, be made, and which is thus then a choice. That you are not alone and therefore lonely, but choose loneliness even if you are not alone.

We exist lonely in ways unique to our current age. We always have to push against these, to stay connected to others, to avoid falling into the void of nothing posting, of losing the ability to converse. Conversely, shouldn’t we strive to private feelings? To avoiding saying too much of ourselves before we understand our own feelings fully? To react fast enough, to always be on top of things, rejecting the experience of having a story sit in ourselves before we express anything into the world.

I am getting older, and I am less interested in answers. In finding reasons and trying to express truths. I’m always growing and becoming something which I am calling myself. I don’t think I’ll ever have the (mis)fortune of having that process end. Fortunate to always change, unfortunate to never knowing something I say or do is right, or longlasting in my own feelings. Maybe this is just some boring facet of some boring thing you realize as you’re growing up, but this is my first time being alive, and I don’t think I’ll get to do any of this again, so I want to take a moment to stick in that and feel it.

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to lose the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books taht are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers.”