Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness. … Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Why do you imagine that I write? Out of some sense of fulfilment, or having cracked the code? One of the things that people have told me they admire about my writing is how personal it is sometimes. So often the subjects I talk about are written as though from an ivory tower, and can thus be seen as lacking the quality of personal experience or a disconnection from the trials and tribulations of normal life. I do not believe this is so in the things I have written. I like to describe this medium, for me, as a kind of journal, but not despite veering into philosophy or theology because that is, in all honesty, who I am. These are just the kinds of things I think about, even with regard to the everyday.

When I first read those words from Rilke, it was in the translator’s preface to a copy of his Letters to a Young Poet. After quoting him, the translator (M.D. Herter Norton) says that “[al]though Rilke expresses himself with a wisdom and a kindness that seem to reflect the calm of self-possession, his spirit may have been speaking out of its own need rather than from the security of ends achieved, so that his words indeed reflect desire rather than fulfilment”. I couldn’t believe what I had just read. I don’t believe it is possible to get closer to my own experience of writing than that. The other day, someone asked me why I don’t take my advice some of the time. They’ll read something I’ve written, especially if it’s a more personal essay, and remark that I’ve failed to follow the advice of my own own written work. Why is this so?

Call it brokenness, sinfulness, hypocrisy, or whatever. The simple fact is that what I have written is oftentimes born out of my own aspirational self. It’s not someone I always am, but it is someone I would always like to be. The fact that I’m not is precisely why I have been able to write the things I have. It’s in having failed to live up to those ideals that I have been made aware of these things and received the kinds of insights that I have. Life isn’t lived from an armchair, and neither is my philosophy.

Born out of desire and aspiration, therefore, my writing isn’t some exercise of moral teaching. More often than not, I’m writing from a place where I’m with you, trying to live up to my own standards, and can hear my own words echoed back to me. It is, for me, a part of self-improvement—the sum of the consequences of the way I’ve lived or continue to live my life—and in writing, perhaps it might be so that others learn something the easy way from what I’ve often learned the hard way.

Last week I mentioned that I started this blog “at a time when I became conscious of my vocation as a philosopher”, but that is not a full description of what I was going through at that time in my life. At that time, not only did I become conscious of this, but I wasn’t living it out. Rilke also speaks of great art as being born out of necessity, and writing felt necessary. Not that I think that what I produce is stellar, by any means, but it comes from a desire to be that person who is writing and through that perhaps it will become true.

Thank you for continuing to encourage me to do so.