Haunting Words

July 23, 2026

Two passages have been haunting me as a writer and a musician. The first is Rainer Maria Rilke’s reference to the “half-artistic” professions in his Letters To a Young Poet. Here is the full quotation:

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art —as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.” (Last paragraph of letter X).

Depending on your profession you might be incensed or traumatized by this sentence. I will not comment on the censure of journalism and almost all of criticism because I do not have Rilke’s certainty. One could accuse him of arrogance, but I do think he is hitting on a truth, which is the human propensity for making ends of our means. Good reporting on current events serves a valuable end for democracy, but it is not meant to be art. Good literary criticism can help us understand great works and what they mean to us, but the criticism itself would not exist without the art. As a writer and podcast producer who puts work online, I would also add podcasting and content creation and cultural criticism to the list of unreal half-artistic professions. They may serve a good purpose, but they are not a worthy end in themselves, and they can easily eclipse art itself. In my own life I have noticed that I often use the busywork of podcast editing or post publishing to avoid the creation of real art (such as my novels or songwriting). Rilke’s words haunt me in those moments.

The second passage that haunts me is Habakkuk 2:20:

“But the Lord is in his majestic palace.
The whole earth is speechless in his presence!”

This comes at the end of four or five lines in which Habakkuk decries lifeless idols that do not speak or talk:

“Woe to the one who says to wood, ‘Wake up!’—
he who says to speechless stone, ‘Awake!’
Can it give reliable guidance?
It is overlaid with gold and silver;
it has no life’s breath inside it.” (NET)

What strikes me is the image of the entire earth being silent. It made me realize just how much noise we all make. Such a cacophony of words and sound. And yes, I do count online words. They may not make noise out loud, but they make noise in our minds. This is humbling to think about. I wonder: What am I doing, adding to this cacophony? Am I following my calling, or just idolizing myself and attempting to talk over God?

Think about this: our laptops and phones are made of precious metals, and we say to them “Wake up!” We ask them for guidance. We use them to magnify and record our most secret vices and our most admirable virtues. We imbue them with meaning just as ancient people imbued idols of wood and stone. By writing content, I am giving a potential reader more meaning to imbue their personal idol with. Of course, this metaphor has limits, or perhaps none, which is what makes it dangerous. If an idol is anything we imbue with meaning, then an idol could be a book or a coffee mug or a house or a person. What is the middle Way here? The point, for me, is to take the pressure off what I create. God does not need me to proclaim His beauty or His goodness. I can be silent before Him.

After spending hours mixing and mastering I have often gone outside and listened to the wind in the trees and the singing of the birds and the subtle creaking of branches and the fluttering of insect wings and thought, “I have never heard music more beautiful than this.” God, after all, is the Lord of sound itself. Our creations, even the Greatest, are really not so great compared with Him. They are only reflections in a dirty mirror. In a similar way, the publishing of art is a compromise, an attempt to reflect the joy and meaning I have discovered in the act of creation. By the time I share it it is already dead to me, but it can take on a new life in the mind of the reader, and so haunt them.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to be haunted by more of words, please consider supporting them by subscribing or buying me a coffee: