Status Updates From Letters to a Young Poet

no paro de llorar

“To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion whollly in itself, in the dark,in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence m, and await with deep humility and patience the birth hour of a new clarity: that alone is the artist life: in understanding as in creating.”

“Leave to your opinions their own quiet 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.”

“Go into yourself and test the depths in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness”

“Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.”