Something Helpless
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
, Letters to a Young Poet (1904)
The image of dragons becoming princesses is strange and arresting. In the old stories, transformation happens to the monster—the hero’s courage breaks the spell. But Rilke suggests something different: the dragons were never really dragons at all. They only appeared that way because we hadn’t yet found the courage to see them truly.
This is a peculiar kind of comfort. It doesn’t promise that what frightens us will go away, only that it might be something other than what we imagined. The terror is real, but it belongs to us. It is, in some deep sense, asking something of us.
When we sit down to make something and feel the weight of all the ways we might be rendered unnecessary, what if that fear itself is asking for attention? Something closer to what Rilke calls love. The willingness to stay present with something uncomfortable, to see what it actually needs.
This isn’t optimism. Rilke isn’t saying everything will be fine. He’s saying that our relationship to difficulty is itself creative, that how we meet what frightens us shapes both us and it. The future, he writes elsewhere in this letter, “enters into us long before it happens.” We are already becoming who we will be in relation to these changes. What would it mean to act “just once, with beauty and courage” toward the thing that frightens us most about making work now?