The guide to life is also a reminder of life.

The celebrated formal refinement of Rilke, which quickly merges with the publicly known image of the elegant, impeccably dressed and faultlessly polite creature of his own mythologizing, is not a turning away from existential urgency but a way to approach that which is too large to be addressed head-on. Every single word on the flamingo’s downy white and reddish hue in “The Flamingos” is as precisely aimed at expressing this richness of existence as Rilke’s weighty contemplations in his letters on the nature of death, the ecstasies of love, or the fundamental innocence of sexual desire. Each intricately chiseled rhyme joins as effortlessly with the great roaring of existence as do the tender, profoundly affecting sentences of condolence in his correspondence. For Rilke, it is not merely a mistake to consider one aspect of life more important than another one and to elevate our memories of childhood or intimations of mortality, say, above the experience we might have upon encountering flamingos, a stray dog, or a hydrangea: it’s an evasion. To celebrate Rilke for the refinement of his language alone is to fixate on the means of his poetry at the expense of its ends—to miss his urging that we be open to reality in all of its manifestations.

The interest of Rilke’s letters lies with his willingness to account for what came his way without simply mastering it formally and instead to continually adapt his insights to that life that would be reliably represented only once it had been fundamentally understood. Rilke’s letters, where he could try out language beyond his talents as a poet, are the reason why his ultimate achievements are far greater than anything one might have predicted from his first volumes of verse. He relinquished the safety of “reliable gain” and took the risk to develop his own idiom, even when he knew he could have continued to write good poetry in the manner for which he had already received accolades. The gift Rilke cultivated was not the ability to coax musicality out of all of language, to produce stunning rhymes and startlingly immediate images for abstract thought. Instead, it was his skill of receiving and processing reality anew each day without resting in the security of his talent and to write without the double safety harness of rhyme and formal structure.

The force of Rilke’s letters results from his awareness that his life and “world,” in a profound sense, surpassed and exceeded him. This is what constitutes life’s richness for us all; it’s also what can make it difficult. The reason the world “surpasses us” is because we make choices and form intentions that are wiped out simply by what happens; we take recourse to names and titles and seek happiness, but all of those forms of refuge may prove transient. Our ways of compartmentalizing the world and our failing to see with equanimity each of its aspects without preference, judgment, or distraction, Rilke writes on January 5, 1921, “puts us in the wrong, makes us culpable, kills us.” And yet this fear of a gradual death brought about by our failure to be mindful—really a death of the imagination—reminds us that it is in fact not a question of mastering or subduing life but of living it. Rilke’s sense of “culpability” allows him to formulate a vision of life that is more integrated than the way he actually lived; the force of his words results from the tension between this emphasis on acceptance and his equally strong preferences about the world around him.

Mindfulness in Rilke

Indisputably, in his life Rilke preferred to accept those aspects of reality that came with room service and a pleasant view. Alas, the biographical details are hard to ignore. The tension between Rilke’s unshakable conviction in his “task,” heroically shared by his steadfast, generous editor and magnanimous patrons, and his frequent illnesses, money trouble, and heartache make for a compelling biography. But the image of the poet outmatched by existence who will find in a stoic death the “quiet denied to him in life” is not only full of pathos; it’s also a distortion since it neglects the fact that Rilke wrote throughout and often directly out of the difficult periods of his life.

We might as well debunk the version of Rilke the healer here. Rilke’s work has been read as a defense against the brittleness of life under modern conditions. But when in 1908 his wife sent him a copy of Speeches by Gotama Buddha, translated from the Pali by the eminent German Indologist Karl Eugen Neumann, Rilke did not read it. The book had quickly become a bestseller and would serve to introduce generations of readers, some already primed by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, to Eastern spiritual thought. Thomas Mann cherished his three-volume copy and took it with him on each transatlantic move, Edmund Husserl was inspired to write an essay on Neumann’s book, and Hermann Hesse drew on it for much of his work. Rilke thanks his wife for sending the book but explains that he will not be able to read it. “I opened [the book] and already with the first words a shudder engulfed me . . . [W]hy does this unfamiliar gesture of hesitation rise in me which is so alienating to you?: It might be that I respond like this for the sake of Malte Laurids [the hero of Rilke’s novel] who I have put off for a while already.” The Buddha book is closed and forgotten—or, if you will, repressed—after the initial shudder. Rilke then outlines his belief that he must defend his own projects against all rivals for his attention (among whom, it must be said, counts his wife). But when Rilke writes that “a shudder engulfed him” upon opening the book, it is also an uncanny shudder of recognition. Rilke knows that his project is nothing else but to write his own Buddha book; the aborted encounter with Gotama Buddha’s speeches prompts another bout of letter writing where he develops, in his own language, all of the themes and terms for his impending work. By developing his own understanding of life rather than adopting a distant belief system, Rilke turns away from Buddha’s words toward his own work and ultimately comes closer to quasi-Buddhist principles than fellow writers Mann, Husserl, and Hesse, who helped popularize Eastern philosophies in the West.

Three years before this encounter with Buddha’s words, Rilke had lived for a while in a small house on the property of sculptor Auguste Rodin in Meudon near Paris, surrounded by the great artist’s works and observing the daily practice of the man who embodied his ideal of the pure artist. Looking out from his window, Rilke faced Rodin’s massive sculpture Buddha at Rest.