Solitude, Snow Days, and Rainer Marie Rilke

Today is Day 6 of what they're calling Snowmageddon [or at least that's what Twitter is calling it. You can also find it under the hashtags #snowpocalypse, #snoverkill, and my personal favorite #snowfecta]. I have been trapped in my apartment for the entirety of the storm, save for the brief lull yesterday afternoon when my roommate and I managed to escape to retrieve some more groceries and a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts. My case is not by any means an uncommon one. If you live anywhere between DC and New York chances are you've been affected heavily by this storm. Though weather reports have a tendency to report these sorts of things in an overblown manner, I can honestly say that most of the reports of the trouble caused by this storm are quite accurate.

Having been homebound now for far longer than I would like, there are two things I've come to appreciate greatly: the first is solitude, and the second is the Internet.


Not long before this storm hit, I came across Rainer Marie Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet at a used book sale. If you've not heard of it, this book is a collection of actual letters that Rilke sent to a young poet named Franz Kappus, who at the time was attending the same military school that Rilke himself had attended. There is a love and a camaraderie in these letters that can't be described in a few quotes. The book itself is very short: I encourage you to read it.

In his letters, Rilke talks at great length about the many and varied things required to become a true poet. He keeps returning to solitude as one of poetry's essential requirements:

We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

The slow, difficult grind of solitude becomes an incubator for creativity. I keep coming back to this idea as I look out the window at the ever-deepening snow. Though I'm not entirely alone here [my roommate and the cat provide great comfort], there is no escaping the feeling of aloneness that a snowstorm creates. No matter how much connectivity one has in a storm of this magnitude, there's a strong sense of solitude.

But this solitude has been a creative impetus for me, and I have produced a lot of creative work in the time I've been relatively alone. Ironically, a good deal of that work has been propagated through my online presence. I continue to be extraordinarily thankful for the communities of which I am a part, and they've proven to be a great comfort as I wait out this storm. To have a sense of community in the face of solitude is, I think, very important, and Rilke seems to agree:

There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

There's a duality to today's online world that Rilke captures here, long before the Internet was even perceived as a possibility. We are all together, alone with our computers. As I sit in my apartment nervously watching the snow pile onto the small balcony outside, I'm experiencing Rilke's sense of 'solitude among other people,' and it's likely that you are experiencing the same. The Internet allows us to create privately and share publicly without lag time. We are all part of a collective solitude that's relatively new to the human experience.

The storm has highlighted this collective solitude for me, and I hope that you'll take some time to appreciate the creativity that this kind of solitude can bring. 'And as for the rest, let life happen to you.'