« Without writing, Rilke's letters suggest, we might fail to grasp what exactly happens and become numb to reality itself, we might accept the obvious and latent hierarchies around us and unwittingly acquiesce to unjust conditions, owing not to cowardice but to our failure to find meaningful expressions for them, and thus make them apparent to us.
His search for the "simple and quiet words," then, does not amount to quietism. [...] Rather, Rilke's sense that one's mere presence on this planet deserves affirmation fueled his commitment to search his experiences for a guide to life. For this reason, Rilke attempted to cast himself in words: he had an urgent need to testify to his life in this world. "How is it possible to live since the elements of this life remain completely ungraspable for us?" Rilke asks in another letter. To the daunting nature of life and its difficulties, Rilke's correspondence is itself an answer.
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconscpicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.
To transcribe "the whole dictation of existence," Rilke renders intelligible to himself what seemed incomprehensible, enigmatic, unassimilable. He makes a dogged effort to capture every last little thing without deciding in advance its ultimate significance, between what may matter and what might leave but a smudge on the great scroll of being. [...]
What will you do, god, when I am dead?
In losing me you lose your meaning... »
— Introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters on Life
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