Lewis Hyde

my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write.

With all devotion and sympathy,

I have them with me here: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer .

from life’s faintest scent to the full, grand savour of its heaviest fruits

You sum him up very well with your phrase about ‘living and writing in rut’.
– And indeed artistic experience lies so incredibly close to sexual experience, to its pains and pleasures, that both phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same desire and felicity.

for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring.

Afraid of what?
Afraid, I think, that he might never become his own person

He lived in fear of two false fates: either that he might end up as lost as the ragged poor who had surrounded him in Paris or else that he might succumb to the safe but numbing comforts of convention.

In the vision Rilke offers, solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied