While in Muzot, on December 8, 1925, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of short prose poems titled “Four Sketches.” This "little notebook with four prose-pieces" was sent to Monique Briod on December 10. In one of the pieces, Rilke refers to a “billoquet”, a variation on the French word, bilboquet. The billoquet was a type of wooden toy, consisting of a cord with a ball on one end and a stick on the other. The goal of the game was to catch the ball on the spike-end of the stick.

For some reason, I kept thinking of the motion of tossing and catching a ball on a leash, and how this leashed ball makes the constraint of the game visible—-and how visible constraints appear in Rilke’s correspondence as the limits of what can be said and transacted in language.

His “Letter to a Young Girl” mesmerized me as a teen. Back then, it seemed so daring in its unboundedness. Now, it is beautiful precisely for the severity of its constraints. I share it here, this little world of consecrated words in epistolary form. This little ball on a leash of its own:

You know that I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion. All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood, for which reason I precede my work, through a pure and simple way of life that is free from irritants and stimulants, as with an introductory prelude, so that I cannot be deceived over the true spiritual joy that consists in a concord, happy and as if transfigured, with the whole of Nature.

A little time yet, and perhaps I shall no longer grasp all the conditions out of which these songs (the Duino Elegies), begun ago, arose. If you know some of these works someday you will understand me better; it is so difficult to say what one sometimes means. If I look into my conscience I see but one law, relentlessly commanding: to lock myself into myself and in one stretch to end this task that was dictated to me at the very center of my heart. I am obeying. For you know that being here I have wanted only that, and I have no right whatsoever to change the direction of my will before I have ended the act of my sacrifice and my obedience.

I have now done almost all the preparatory work, that is, I have redressed the uncomfortable delays of my correspondence. Think, I have written—I counted them this morning—115 letters, and not one was less than four pages, and many ran to eight, even twelve in close writing. (Naturally I do not count what has gone off to you. That is not writing, that is breathing through the pen.)

How many long hours of letters! There are so many people who expect of me—I hardly know what: help, advice—from me, who find myself so helpless before the most imperative urgencies of my life. And although I know they deceive themselves, are mistaken, still I feel tempted–and I don't believe it is vanity–-to tell them something out of my experiences, some of the fruits of loneliness. There are young women as well as young girls terribly deserted even in the bosom of their family. Young married women appalled at what has happened to them. And then all these young working people, mostly revolutionaries, who come out of literature and write drunken, malicious poetry. What shall I say about the state prisons without any orientation whatever, take refuge into them? How to raise their despairing hearts, how shape their formless will, which under the violence of events has taken on a borrowed, quite provisional character, and which they now carry in themselves like an alien strength, the use of which they scarcely know.

Malte's experiences oblige me from time to time to answer these writings from people I do not know. He, he would have done it, if ever a voice had reached him. Furthermore it is he who obliges me to continue this sacrifice, exhorts me to love with all my love's capacities all things to which I want to give form. That is the irresistible force the usufruct of which he left to me. Imagine to yourself a Malte who should have had a lover or even a friend in that Paris that was so terrible for him. Would he then ever have entered so deep into the confidence of things? For these things (he often told me in our few intimate conversations), whose essential life you want to reproduce, first ask you: Are you free? Are you ready to dedicate your whole love to me? To lie with me, as Saint Julian the hospitable lay with the leper, in that ultimate embrace that can never be fulfilled in an ordinary and fleeting love of one's neighbor, but has for its impetus love, the whole of love, all love to be found on earth? And if a thing like that sees (so Malte told me), if it sees you busy with even a single line of your own interest, it will close itself to you. It will perhaps bestow a rule upon you with a word, make you some slight sign of friendship, but it will forgo giving you its heart, entrusting you with its patient nature and its starlike steadfastness, which makes it so much resemble the constellations of the sky.

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe and which in this incomparable place on that day the angels serve. What you read here, my friend, is a chapter of those lectures I received from Malte, my only friend during so many years full of suffering and temptations, and I see that you mean the same, absolutely, when you speak of your drawings and paintings, which seem  valid only because of that infatuation with which brush or pencil carry out the embrace, the tender taking of possession.

Don't be frightened by the expression "fate", which I used in my last letter. I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary.

Cézanne must have understood this when during the last years of his life he removed himself from everything that, as he expressed it, might "hook him tight", and when, religious and given to traditions as he was, he yet gave up going to his mother's funeral in order not to lose a working day. That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a "coup", remains nonetheless at the mercy  of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law.

I have often had to take away Malte's writings from young people, forbidding them to read them. For this book, which seems to emerge in the proof that life is impossible, must so to speak be read against its current. If it contains bitter reproaches, these are absolutely not directed against life. On the contrary, they are the evidence that, for lack of strength, through distraction and inherited errors we lose almost completely the countless earthly riches that were intended for us.

Try, my dearest friend, to run through the overabundance of those pages in this spirit. This will not spare you tears, but will contribute to giving all your tears a meaning clearer and, so to speak, more transparent.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969): 255-258.]