The Poet's Guide to Life
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
ON LIFE AND LIVING - You Have to Live Life to the Limit
ON BEING WITH OTHERS - To Be a Part, That Is Fulfillment for Us
ON WORK - Get Up Cheerfully on Days You Have to Work
ON DIFFICULTY AND ADVERSITY - The Measure by Which We May Know Our Strength
ON CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION - This Joy in Daily Discovery
ON NATURE - It Knows Nothing of Us
ON SOLITUDE - The Loneliest People Above All Contribute Most to Commonality
ON ILLNESS AND RECOVERY - Pain Tolerates No Interpretation
ON LOSS, DYING, AND DEATH - Even Time Does Not “Console” . . . It Puts Things in Their Place and Creates Order
ON LANGUAGE - That Vast, Humming, and Swinging Syntax
ON ART - Art Presents Itself as a Way of Life
ON FAITH - A Direction of the Heart
ON GOODNESS AND MORALITY - Nothing Good, Once It Has Come into Existence, May Be Suppressed
ON LOVE - There Is No Force in the World but Love
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
SOURCES
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
Ulrich Baer
But to have been
once, even though only once:
this having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal.
All that we
can achieve here, is to recognize ourselves completely
in what can be seen on earth.
DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)
Every morning the poet sat down at his desk to work. Everything had been carefully prepared: he had dressed in shirt, tie, and a dark tailored suit; eaten breakfast at the table (whenever possible, there was real silver and heavy linen); sipped his good coffee; and kept most of his language to himself, expending it only to address his discreet housekeeper with a brief comment about the weather or how the cut flowers were nicely holding up. Now he faced the two pens before him. One pen was reserved for work— the few volumes of poems that he had published and the single novel that had won him some acclaim—while the other was the pen for dispensing with bills, requests, and letters, the sort of things that required words and language but did not qualify, as far as the reading public or his own exacting self were concerned, as poetic “work.” He had adopted a maxim early in life, during one of his apprenticeships with an older artist whose exemplary focus had been an inspiration: “One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.” On several occasions, he had cited this maxim in print and had even authored a short book on the artist’s work and life. But, in truth, it had not been easy for him to understand how a person could so uncompromisingly privilege work above all else. Alas, how to live according to this mantra, which extolled the sanctification of work, proved even harder. Nothing but work. Every morning, face nothing but yourself, be truly alone, and choose between the two pens that could channel the production of the day. There was the desk, carefully placed in the center of the room and lovingly covered with a silk scarf lent by a wealthy friend; there were the flowers sent by the same friend and arranged in a round white vase; there was one stack of expensive “work” paper and another one of equally expensive (really quite indulgent) stationery. Everything was set, he was dressed the part, and now it was only a matter of setting pen to paper and then “nothing but work.” But Rilke knew that his maxim was starting to sound as hollow as most daily prayers, and he knew even more acutely that all his trappings were nothing but a disguise, a masquerade to cover up the self-indulgent urge to get up and walk somewhere, go back to bed, to check on the mail or on the roses, to give in to temptation and take a walk, take a call, take a break. Just as he was about to rise from his chair, ready to lose this morning’s battle that lasted but seconds and yet tore at his soul, his eyes fell on the small book listing his correspondence. Every letter he received was entered there with name and date, and those to whom he had responded were crossed off.
He would write letter after letter, several of them running up to eight pages in length. The next thing that happened was the housekeeper’s gentle tapping on the door. It was lunchtime. A stack of neatly addressed envelopes had risen on the table, and more than two dozen names had been crossed off “the certain little list” in the small book. Had he worked? Which pen had been picked up? For several hours, language had coursed through him as if it were oil or wax that becomes more pliant when subjected to movement and heat. His pen had yielded what he called “the juice”: a few of the letters were personal, playful, brimming with witty images, self-mocking asides and details of his everyday life; others barely contained a proper greeting before unfolding an extended and precise reflection on a particular question or problem. Throughout the morning, Rilke had conversed intimately with a series of individuals, ever so slightly inflecting his voice for each of them. In the process of writing his letters, he had advanced not only his thinking but also his language. Since these were letters destined to leave him within hours, however, they served a different function from the journal, diary, and notebooks he kept to jot down drafts and ideas as potential seeds for longer poems. The letters became the rehearsal space of which Rilke lifted the curtain on his creative process just enough to fend off the sense of isolation that threatened to undermine his hard-won and cherished solitude. “In addition to my voice which points beyond me,” he writes in a letter of January 24, 1920, “there is still the sound of that small longing which originates in my solitude and which I have not entirely mastered, a whistling-woeful tone that blows through a crack in this leaky solitude—, it calls out, alas, and summons others to me!” The work pen had not been touched, no poem had been born, and a few of the sheets reserved only for verse had even been conscripted when the stationery had run out. Pages and pages had been filled. And although Rilke sent these letters out, he had amassed and saved for others the wealth of expressed ideas, striking images, and verbalized thoughts that he would later distill into the denser shapes of his poetic work.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s work has captured the imagination of musicians, philosophers, artists, writers, and poetry lovers, and it has extended the reach of poetry to people rarely concerned with human utterances cast in verse. Marlene Dietrich, Martin Heidegger, and Warren Zevon all recited Rilke poems by heart. This capacity of Rilke’s words to touch such different people as if each word had been written just for them, aside from his esteem among fellow poets and academics, lends his poetry its force and has saved his work from becoming simply an artifact of the civilization that Hegel first called Old Europe. The power of Rilke’s writings results from his capacity to interlock the description of everyday objects, minute feelings, small gestures, and overlooked things— that which makes up the world for each of us—with transcendent themes.
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