the pen vacillates and hesitates

I so much wish to speak with you in person. My pen has grown a bit cold and exhausted from using it apart from my actual work. It seems to me that this dual use, which is already so damaging to writing, makes it sometimes entirely uncertain. Because what one expresses immediately, just in order to communicate something, is so very different from the lasting expression of art that needs to be captured and accepted with full consciousness in order to make itself be understood much later. And the pen, between those two tasks, vacillates and hesitates. So many times I envied Rodin his docile and relaxed earthen clay, which cannot be used to say hello or to order a meal!

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Catherine Pozzi (August 21, 1924), as translated by Ulrich Baer in his collection of Rilke's letters, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief and Transformation.