i'm what three pages in? and i'm already in love

• things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours.
• nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. there is only one way. go into yourself. examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. this above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must i write? dig down into yourself for a deep answer. and if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘i must’, then construct your life according to this necessity.
• don’t write love poems [...] flee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty – depict all this with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory.
• [...] your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off.
• a work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.
• for he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
• go through your development quietly and seriously; you cannot disrupt it more than by looking outwards and expecting answers from without to questions that only your innermost instinct in your quietest moments will perhaps be able to answer.
• to let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work.
• these things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. to be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. it will come. but it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them.
• if you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.
• you are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and i should like to ask you, as best i can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. and what matters is to live everything.
• take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand. look for some kind of simple and loyal way of being together with them which does not necessarily have to alter however much you may change; love in them a form of life different from your own and show understanding for the older ones who fear precisely the solitude in which you trust.
• believe in a love which is stored up for you like an inheritance, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a benediction out of whose sphere you do not need to issue even if your journey is a long one.
• what goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
• if there is no communal feeling between you and other people, try to be near to things – they will not abandon you.

on god

• ask yourself, dear mr kappus, whether you have really lost god after all? is it not rather the case that you have never yet possessed him? for when was it supposed to have been? do you think a child can hold him, him whom grown men only bear with difficulty and whose weight bows down the old?
• why don’t you think of him as a coming god, who since eternity has lain ahead of us, the future one, the eventual fruit of a tree of which we are the leaves? what prevents you from casting his birth out into the times of becoming and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy?
• if he is the complete being, must not slighter things come before him, so that he can pick himself out of fullness and abundance? – must he not be the last in order to encompass all things in himself?
• celebrate christmas in the piety of the feeling that he perhaps requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. ⠀
• and you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it [...] people have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.
• we know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. it is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
• to love is also good, for love is hard.
• the demands that the hard work of love makes on our development are larger than life, and as beginners we are not a match for them. but if we can hold out and take this love upon us as a burden and an apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the trivial and frivolous games behind which people have hidden from the utter seriousness of their existence, then perhaps a small advance and some relief will be sensible to those who come long after us.
• love then is what my hands attempt to grasp / because i want to say a prayer whose sounds / my burning mouth, my lips, cannot bring forth
• if it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnesses with greater assurance than our joys. for they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us.
• and that is why sadness passes: what is new in us, the thing that has supervened, has entered into our heart, penetrated to its innermost chamber and not lingered even there – it is already in our blood.
• for it is not lethargy alone which causes human relationships to repeat themselves in the same old way with such unspeakable monotony in instance after instance; it is the fearful shying away from any kind of new, unforeseeable experience which we think we may not be equal to.
• perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.
• so, dear mr kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before [...] you must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.