Why don't I just write in word documents or notebooks?
Why is it so important that I put my thoughts 'out there'?
Rilke reminded me why.
Mr. Kappus, the young poet to whom he was writing, sent him a poem.
Rilke, interestingly, decided to transcribe the poem, sending it to Mr. Kappus in his own handwriting.
"I have copied your sonnet...," he explains, "because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your most innermost being how very much it is your own...." (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 67).
My blog feels this way sometimes.
I deposit my thoughts here.
I express myself and confide into this funny little digital window.
Then I come back and I read it.
And I, too, rediscover my own thoughts.
I see them rendered in an external space, accessible to anyone, and suddenly I can imagine other people encountering my writing. Suddenly I can imagine reading my writing as if someone else had written it.
I could just write into a word document.
But it wouldn't be the same.
Thank you, Rilke, for making this clearer for me.
How remarkable to imagine Rilke transcribing someone's poem with the intention of making them aware of its novelty, its depths.
To rediscover your own thoughts in the handwriting of another.
To appreciate your own thoughts as if from the outside.
How odd it all is.
How excellent Rilke's letters are.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I just stumbled onto your blog while searching for a pdf version of Collingwood's Speculum Mentis. But then I got distracted and stayed on here for about an hour reading about you, your thoughts, and the way you've come to them and worked with them. Fascinating stuff. You've got a beautiful example of what a blog can be, here. I'm glad I found you, because it's rather hard to find fellow devotees of Collingwood, and I note that we seem to move in similar forests of ideas -- historicism, habit, military history, and the mutual elaboration of ethics and aesthetics are central components of my research as well. Are you part of a graduate department somewhere? I'm a phd student in philosophy at Boston College. It might be interesting to correspond a bit; either way, I'll be following this blog with interest henceforth.
ReplyDelete