Fresh, Green Life, the latest novel from Sebastian Castillo, opens with two epigraphs, both from Rainer Maria Rilke: “You must change your life,” from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and “Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody,” from Letters to a Young Poet. The collected letters from Rilke to the cadet Franz Kappus are full of weighty advice from a world-weary poet not yet thirty, eager to impress upon the younger man the correct model for living. He preaches the inward turn, silence and retreat from the world. In the years leading up to the first World War the two men exchanged a number of letters in which Rilke is insistent on the importance of these virtues if one would seek the artistic life. In the end the advice was not enough, and Kappus did not follow his counselor into the literary canon. The Letters are published sans his contributions and the result is Rilke’s voice only, dictating to a void. Nobody, he says, can help you. Nevertheless, he is willing to try.
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