Ahead of All Parting (46 page)

For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent
because
they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are
already
invisible, although still
(for us) physically lasting.… All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality;
a few stars intensify immediately and pass away in the infinite consciousness of the angels—, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We
, let it be emphasized once more,
we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task
(beside which there is, essentially, no other).

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

… a calyx column stands there, alone, a survivor, and you can’t encompass it, so far out beyond your life does it reach; only together with the night can you somehow take it in, perceiving it with the stars, as a whole, and then for a second it becomes human—a human experience.

(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)

I sometimes wonder whether longing can’t radiate out from someone so powerfully, like a storm, that nothing can come to him from the opposite direction. Perhaps William Blake has somewhere drawn that—?

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, May 14, 1912)

You must understand the concept of the “Open,” which I have tried to propose in this Elegy, as follows: The animal’s degree of consciousness is such that it comes into the world without at every moment setting the world over against itself (as we do). The animal is
in
the world; we stand
in front of
the world because of the peculiar turn and heightening which our consciousness has taken. So by the “Open” it is not sky or air or space that is meant; they, too, for the human being who observes and judges, are “objects” and thus “opaque” and closed. The animal or the flower presumably
is
all that, without accounting for itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents for us perhaps only in the first moments of love, when we see our own vastness in the person we love, and in the ecstatic surrender to God.

(To Lev P. Struve, February 25, 1926, in Maurice Betz,
Rilke in Frankreich: Erinnerungen—Briefe—Dokumente
,
Wien / Leipzig / Zürich: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937)

Altogether, he was able to observe how all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly; this might have been due to his own vision, which was no longer directed forward and diluted in empty space; he was looking, as if over his shoulder,
backward
at Things, and their now completed existence took on a bold, sweet aftertaste, as though everything had been spiced with a trace of the blossom of parting.

(“An Experience,”
this page
)

Nearby there was one of the darker birdcalls, a more mature one, already sung inwardly, which was to the others as a poem is to a few words—how it shone toward God, already, already, how devout it was, how filled with itself, a song-bud still in the calyx of its sound, but already aware of its own irrepressible fullness, pre-blissful and pre-afraid. Or rather, the fear was entirely there, the indivisible pain common to all creatures, which is as simple as the blissfulness over there, on the other side, where all has been surmounted.

(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 24, 1920)

That a multitude of creatures which come from externally exposed seeds have
that
as their maternal body, that vast sensitive freedom—how much at home they must feel in it all their lives; in fact they do nothing but leap for joy in their mother’s womb, like little John the Baptist; for this same space has both conceived them and brought them forth, and they never leave its security.

Until in the bird everything becomes a little more uneasy and cautious. The nest that Nature has given him is already a small maternal womb, which he only covers instead of wholly containing it. And suddenly, as if it were no longer safe enough outside, the wonderful maturing flees wholly into the darkness of the creature and emerges into the world only at a later turning-point, experiencing it as a second world and never entirely weaned from the conditions of the earlier, more intimate one.

(Rivalry between mother and world—)

(Notebook entry, February 20, 1914; SW 6, 1074 f.)

The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last. Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savor and enjoy itself in a new mixture.

(To Ilse Erdmann, January 31, 1914)

Hardly had she cried her breathless prayer

when a numbness seized her body; her soft breasts

were sealed in bark, her hair turned into leaves,

her arms into branches; her feet, which had been so quick,

plunged into earth and rooted her to the spot.

Only her shining grace was left. Apollo

still loved her; he reached out his hand to touch

the laurel trunk, and under the rough bark

could feel her heart still throbbing …

(Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 548 ff.)

Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything was a vessel in which they found what is human and added to the supply of what is human.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

I often wonder whether things unemphasized in themselves haven’t exerted the most profound influence on my development and my work: the encounter with a dog; the hours I spent in Rome watching a
rope-maker, who in his craft repeated one of the oldest gestures in the world—as did the potter in a little village on the Nile; standing beside his wheel was indescribably and in a most mysterious sense fruitful for me.…

(To Alfred Schaer, February 26, 1924)

The Spanish landscape (the last one that I experienced absolutely), Toledo, pushed this attitude of mine to its extreme limit: because there the external Thing itself—tower, mountain, bridge—already possessed the extraordinary, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents through which one might have wished to represent it. Everywhere appearance and vision merged, as it were, in the object; in each one of them a whole inner world was revealed, as though an angel who encompassed all space were blind and gazing into himself. This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task—one, at any rate, in which all my previous attempts would converge.

(To Ellen Delp, October 27, 1915)

We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not
beyond
our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim: we are
full
whenever we reach it—and being full means (for us) being heavy.—I am not saying that we should
love
death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself—. What do we know of it?!

Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a
friend
, our deepest friend, perhaps
the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations—and this, you must understand,
not
in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says
only
Yes. In the presence of eternity.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

Lou, dear Lou, finally:

At this moment, Saturday, the eleventh of February, at 6 o’clock, I am putting down my pen after completing the last Elegy, the Tenth. The one (even then it was intended as the last one) whose first lines were already written in Duino: “Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.…” What there was of it I once read to you; but only the first twelve lines have remained, all the rest is new and: yes, very, very glorious!—Imagine! I have been allowed to survive until this. Through everything. Miracle. Grace.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 11, 1922)

Consolation is one of the many diversions we are subject to, a distraction, hence something essentially frivolous and unfruitful.—Even time doesn’t “console,” as people superficially say, at most it arranges, it sets in order—, and only because we later pay so little attention to the order toward which it so quietly collaborates that instead of marveling at what is now established and assuaged, reconciled in the great whole, we think it is some forgetfulness of our own, some weakness of heart, just because it no longer hurts us so much. Ah, how little the heart really forgets it,—and how strong it would be if we didn’t withdraw its tasks from it before they are fully and truly accomplished!—Our instinct shouldn’t be to want to console ourselves
for such a loss, rather it should become our deep and painful curiosity to wholly explore it, the particularity, the uniqueness of precisely
this
loss, to discover its effect within our life, indeed we should summon up the noble avarice of enriching our inner world by precisely
it
, by its meaning and heaviness … The more deeply such a loss touches us and the more intensely it affects us, the more it becomes a
task
, of newly, differently, and finally taking into our possession what now, in its being lost, is accented with hopelessness:
this
then is unending accomplishment which immediately overcomes all negative qualities that cling to pain, all laziness and indulgence that always constitute a part of pain, this is active, inward-working pain, the only kind that makes sense and is worthy of us. I don’t like the Christian ideas of a Beyond, I am getting farther and farther away from them, naturally without any thought of attacking them—; they may have a right to their existence beside so many other hypotheses about the divine periphery,—but for me they contain above all the danger not only of making those who have vanished more indistinct to us and above all more inaccessible—; but also we ourselves, because we allow our longing to pull us
away
from here, thereby become less definite, less earthly: which nevertheless, for the present, as long as we are
here
and related to tree, flower, and soil, we in a purest sense have to remain, even still have to become!… I reproach all modern religions for having provided their believers with consolations and glossings-over of death, instead of giving them the means of coming to an understanding with it. With it and with its full, unmasked cruelty: this cruelty is so immense that it is precisely with
it
that the circle closes: it leads back into a mildness which is greater, purer, and more perfectly clear (all consolation is muddy!) than we have ever, even on the sweetest spring day, imagined mildness to be. But toward the experiencing of this deepest mildness, which, if even a few of us were to feel it with conviction, could perhaps little by little penetrate and make transparent all the relations of life: toward the experiencing of
this
most rich and complete mildness mankind has never taken even the first steps,—unless in its most ancient, most innocent ages, whose secret is all but lost to us. The content of the “initiations” was, I am sure, nothing but the communicating of a “key” that allowed people to read the word “death”
without
negation; like the moon, surely life has
a side permanently turned away from us which is not its opposite but its counterpart toward completion, toward wholeness, toward the actual perfect and full sphere and globe of
being.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)