Live The Questions Now.

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

This post was originally published September 14, 2023.

I don’t generally re-read books. Parts of them, sure, but whole books? There’s just too many new books for me to spend my time reading instead. There is one book though, that I’ve read at least three times, front-to-back.

Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of letters sent by poet Rainer Maria Rilke in response to Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and hopeful writer. Rilke himself had some success at the time, though like all writers, lamented the fact that he was too poor to buy even his own work, and thus could not send them to young Kappus.

The letters are filled with quotable lines. So many, in fact, that it is the only book I have taken to with a highlighter. I don’t like to highlight books, as it feels like I’m infringing on the sanctity of the art in some way, but I first took to the pages with yellow ink when I was sitting in the Oslo Airport, awaiting my flight to Greece.

The letters explore several themes I’m familiar with: a yearning for writing, solitude, and uncertainty. These recurring themes keep me coming back to the book in times of duress like when someone I was close to died, I was striking out on my own, and I was experiencing the biggest pandemic of my lifetime. I sat with the book and remembered why these things are difficult, that it’s okay that they’re difficult, and it’s okay that I will experience them again and again in my lifetime.

The first lines I highlighted were: “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

This follows Rilke’s acknowledgement of Kappus’ “anxiety about life.” He advises Kappus to spend less time worrying and “to have patience with everything unresolved in [Kappus’] heart and to try to love the questions themselves.”

When things are difficult, I keep coming back to these highlighted lines. Reading over and over again to live everything. To live the questions.

One day, I was sitting in an anthropological theory class and jotted down a note that struck me. The professor said something along the lines of “Asking meaningful questions gives meaningful information. If we’re not getting meaningful information, something is probably wrong with the question.” As I detailed in my many posts about archaeology, including my experience in the field, the human experience is fraught with complexity and the importance is not in any product but the context of it. Sometimes this is easier when I think about people long since dead, and not myself and my present, which one day may be subject to archaeologists or readers of my work.

Grief, loneliness, and fear are immense and complex emotions. They appear under different circumstances with different contexts, but throughout my life, I feel them over and over again, and inevitably, I wonder: “How can I stop feeling this way?” Over time, I’ve learned to ask better, more meaningful questions about my emotions. Things like “why do I feel this way?” and “how can I coexist with this feeling without it consuming me?” These are not always easy questions to answer, but they bring me some peace, as I at least know that I am getting better at asking meaningful questions.

Rilke’s advice always lingers with me. My work as researcher, archaeologist, and writer is to ask questions, to read them, and to write them. Because to ask a good question begets a hundred more, and that’s the beautiful thing about the human experience. There will always be more to learn, and I will continue learning by simply living.