Maybe Rilke Was Right, Part I
“Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
I’ve lived in Paris for twelve years as a writer and a musician, and I feel as lost as I’ve ever been. I’ve been working on a second novel for the better part of eight years now. When did writing become a way to escape myself? That sentence stuck with me the other while I was on a half-dose of acid. And it’s true, I think: on the page, I’ve started to feel less and less like myself. There’s too much trying, too much perfecting, too much prevarication between my well-researched opinions and the creature trying to figure out who I actually am.
What do I believe in? And what am I really trying to say? I’m thirty-three years old, and I still don’t know the answer to these questions. And that’s the great fear, isn’t it, the one that keeps me up at night? The reason why I can’t seem to finish my second novel? The great empty so many writers feel in the pit of their stomach, gurgling up into their throat: what if I simply have nothing to say?
Writer’s block. Depression. The creative black hole. It doesn’t matter what we call it. We all know what it is. But maybe it’s time to stop running away from the possibility that I don’t, in fact, have anything to say. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage,” Rilke said.
Maybe Rilke was right. Maybe we’ve been wrong about it all along. Maybe what I need now is silence. Maybe in the age of Twitter and #tldr, too much is being written and said all of the time. Maybe all of the stories and posts and links and essays and blogs and tweets and text messages and group chats and online seminars and short captions and long captions and targeted hashtags are more than enough proof that we don’t need more.
Maybe now is the time to be silent. Maybe now is the time to peel ourselves away from the machines. Maybe now is the time to bite our oh-so-sanctified tongues, shut up, and listen. But listen to what, and to whom? That’s an entirely different question.
