Rilke knew his silence would disappoint, and by apologizing for it he recognized and finally assumed the role of counselor, confessor, spiritual adviser, and sage of the everyday that many of his correspondents had acknowledged and welcomed for years but that he had half-mockingly refused all along. The self-valediction by a man who pleaded with friends to keep a priest from his hospital bed at all costs and who was very reluctant to permit doctors access because he feared the division they created between his body and himself, is part of Rilke’s legacy. “His correspondence” had become not just simply a task but a moral responsibility; it had attained the status usually accorded poetry. When Rilke asked for the card to be printed in both German and French, he also split himself into two languages and thus opened the possibility that either he had lost his notion of belonging to a native idiom or culture, or he recognized his voice to reach beyond what he had been identified with throughout his life. In this final written missive to the world, Rilke neither apologized nor voiced regret that he would write no more poetry; in the very act of crafting his correspondence, however, he had revealed a side of himself that could not be forgotten.
Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.
[T]here are so many people who expect of me, I don’t know
exactly what—help, advice (of me who finds himself so baffled and helpless before life’s most tremendous urgencies!)—and although I know that they are mistaken, that they are wrong in this regard, I am tempted nonetheless (and I don’t believe that this is an act of vanity!) to share with them a few of my experiences—some of the fruits of my long solitudes . . . And women and young girls,
terribly abandoned even at the bosom of their families—and newly-weds, horrified by what just happened to them . . . , and then all of these young people, for the most part revolutionary workers who leave the state prisons completely directionless and who stumble into “literature” by writing poems like mean drunks . . . : what to tell them? How to lift up their desperate heart, how to shape their disfigured will, which has assumed the character of something borrowed and altogether provisional under the impact of events and which they now carry inside themselves like an alien power that they hardly know how to use!
ON LIFE AND LIVING
You Have to Live Life to the Limit
There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities. Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body of pain whose exact composition we ultimately do not know. Just as we do not know how much vital energy this foreign body, once it has been thus dissolved, might impart to our bloodstream!
If we wish to be let in on the secrets of life, we must be mindful of two things: first, there is the great melody to which things and scents, feelings and past lives, dawns and dreams contribute in equal measure, and then there are the individual voices that complete and perfect this full chorus. And to establish the basis for a work of art, that is, for an image of life lived more deeply, lived more than life as it is lived today, and as the possibility that it remains throughout the ages, we have to adjust and set into their proper relation these two voices: the one belonging to a specific moment and the other to the group of people living in it.
Wishes! Desires! What does life know about them? Life urges and pushes forward and it has its mighty nature into which we stare with our waiting eyes.
Life takes pride in not appearing uncomplicated. If it relied on simplicity, it probably would not succeed in moving us to do all those things that we are not easily moved to do . . .
A conscious fate that is aware of our existence . . . yes, how often we long for such a fate that would make us stronger and affirm us. But would such a fate not instantly become a fate that beholds us from the outside, observes us like a spectator, a fate that we would no longer be alone with? The fact that we have been placed into a “blind fate” that we inhabit allows us to have our own perspective and is the very condition of our perspicacious innocence. It is due only to the “blindness” of our fate that we are so profoundly related to the world’s wonderful density, which is to say to the totality that we cannot survey and that exceeds us.
Seeing is for us the most authentic possibility of acquiring something. If god had only made our hands to be like our eyes—so ready to grasp, so willing to relinquish all things—then we could truly acquire wealth. We do not acquire wealth by letting something remain and wilt in our hands but only by letting everything pass through their grasp as if through the festive gate of return and homecoming. Our hands ought not to be a coffin for us but a bed sheltering the twilight slumber and dreams of the things held there, out of whose depths their dearest secrets speak.
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