Letters to a young poet.

Jaime bought me this book 2 christmas's ago and I barely picked it up 2 months ago. In my current mood, I found this passage and thought to use it as a point of motivation. "-I know, your profession is hard and full of contradiction of yourself, and I foresaw your complaint and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot comfort you, I can only advise you to consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of enmity against the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who have found themselves mute and sullen in a humdrum duty. The situation in which you now have to live is no more heavily laden with conventions, prejudices and mistakes than all the other situations, and if there are some the feign a greater freedom, still there is none that is in itself broad and spacious and in contact with the big things of which real living consists. Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midsts of sheer life. ...you would have felt just the same in any established professions; yes, even if, outside of any position, you had merely sought some ligh and independen contact with society, this feeling of constraint would not have been spared you.-It is so everywhere; but that is no reason for fear or sorrow; if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; ..everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate."-Rainer Rilke