The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  That evening, though, it was worse than ever. It was not yet particularly late, but I was tired and had already gone to bed; I thought I would probably get some sleep. Suddenly I started as if someone had touched me. Immediately after, it began. It rebounded and rolled and knocked against something and teetered and came to a clattering stop. The stamping was fearful. While this was going on, someone on the floor below was banging distinctly and angrily on the ceiling. The new lodger was being disturbed as well, of course. Now: that had to be his door. I was so wide awake that I thought I heard his door despite the extraordinary care he took when opening it. I imagined he was coming closer. Doubtless he wanted to know which room the noise was coming from. What irritated me was his truly overdone show of consideration. After all, he had just been able to see just how little store was set by peace and quiet in that establishment. Why on earth was he treading so softly? For a moment I thought he was at my door; and then I heard him, beyond the shadow of a doubt, entering the next room. Without any ado, he walked right in.

  And now (how shall I describe it?), now silence fell. It was as silent as in the aftermath of pain. The silence was strangely palpable and prickling, as if a wound were healing. I could have slept right away; I could have taken a deep breath and fallen asleep. It was only my astonishment that kept me awake. Somebody was speaking next door, but that too was part of the silence. The nature of that silence had to be experienced; it cannot be described. Outside, too, it was as if everything were calm and composed. I sat up and listened, and it was like being in the country. Dear God, I thought, his mother is there. She was sitting with the lamp at her side, talking to him, and perhaps he was resting his head a little on her shoulder. Presently she would be putting him to bed. Now I knew what that soft tread out in the passage had been. Ah, to think that it was still possible. Such a creature, for whom doors open in such a way as they never do for us. Yes, now we could sleep.

  [51] I have already almost forgotten my neighbour. I quite see that I took no genuinely sympathetic interest in him. At times I do ask downstairs, in passing, if there is any news of him, and what it might be. And I am pleased if there is good news. But I am overdoing it: I do not really need to know. If I sometimes feel a sudden temptation to go into the room next door, it is no longer to do with him. It is only a single pace from my door to the next, and the room is not locked. I should be interested to know what that room really looks like. It is easy to imagine any room, and often what you imagine is about right. It is only the room next to your own that is invariably quite different from how you picture it.

  I tell myself that it is in this that the temptation lies for me. But I know full well that what awaits me in there is a certain metal object. I assume that it really is the lid of a can, though of course I may be wrong. That does not trouble me. It is in my nature to blame the whole business on a tin lid. Presumably he will not have taken it with him. Doubtless the room has been tidied and the lid replaced on the tin where it belongs. And now, the two together constitute the concept ‘tin’, a round tin, to be precise – a simple and perfectly familiar concept. I feel I can remember their being on the mantelpiece, these two things that constitute the tin. Yes, they are even in front of the mirror, so that behind them there is a second tin, an unsubstantial one that looks deceptively like the real one, a tin we attach no value to but which a monkey, say, would reach for – in fact, there would even be two monkeys reaching for it, because the monkey would be duplicated too, once it was above the lintel of the mantel. At all events, it is the lid of this tin that has got it in for me.

  Let us agree on one thing: the lid of a tin – of a sound tin, the rim of which has the same curvature as its own – this lid ought to have no other desire than to be on its tin; that ought to be the uttermost it could want, the ultimate satisfaction, the fulfilment of its every wish. There is something veritably ideal in being turned patiently and gently and resting evenly on the contraposed edge, feeling the grip of the rim, elastic and as sharp as your own rim is when you lie there alone. Ah, but how few lids there are that can still appreciate this. This nicely illustrates the confusion that contact with humankind has occasioned among things. Humankind, if we may very briefly compare them with these lids, fit on to their occupations most reluctantly, and with a bad grace. Partly because in their haste they have not hit upon the right one, partly because they have been put on crooked and in anger, partly because the corresponding rims are curved in different ways. Let's be honest about it: all they essentially think about is to jump down the moment they get the chance, roll and clatter about. Why else would we have all these so-called amusements, and the racket they make?

  Things have by now been observing this for centuries. No wonder they are corrupted, if they lose the taste for their natural, silent functions and want to take advantage of existence just as they see it everywhere being taken advantage of. They try to get out of the uses to which they are properly put; they grow listless, neglect their duties, and people are not at all surprised to catch them on a jag. They know what it's like from their own experience. They are angered because they are the stronger ones, because they suppose they have more of a right to a change, because they feel they are being aped; but they let the matter go, just as they let themselves go. But wherever there is one who pulls himself together, some solitary who wants to rest roundly upon himself day and night, verily he provokes the opposition, the mockery and the hatred of the degenerate objects, whose bad consciences cannot tolerate the thought that anything might control itself and strive to achieve its own meaning. They join forces to trouble, scare and confound him, knowing that they can do it. Winking at one another, they set about that temptation that ramifies infinitely, enlisting every creature under the sun, and even God Himself, against that solitary one who may perhaps endure: the saint.

  [52] How well I now understand those wondrous pictures in which things intended for limited and regular uses stretch out and attempt each other, lascivious, inquisitive, quivering with the casual lewdness of dissipation. Those cauldrons that stroll about, boiling; those pistons that have got funny ideas into their heads; and those indolent funnels poking into holes for fun. And then those limbs and members, tossed up by the envious void, and faces pouring hot vomit upon them, and farting arses presented for a pleasuring.

  And the saint writhes and flinches; yet in his eyes there lingers a look that concedes that these things are possible – he saw them. And already his senses are forming a precipitate in the clear solution of his soul. Already his prayer is losing its leaves and rises from his mouth like a dead tree. His heart has tipped over and spilled its contents into the murk. The lash of his scourge is as weak as a tail flicking off flies. His sex is once again in one place alone, and when a woman walks erect through the throng, her bared bosom full of breasts, it points to her like a finger.38

  There were times when I thought these pictures obsolete. Not that I doubted them. I could imagine that in those days such things did happen to the saints, those over-hasty zealots who wanted to get straight to God from the very start, whatever the cost. We no longer feel equal to these trials. We sense that He is too difficult for us, that we must postpone Him so that we may slowly accomplish the long work that separates us from Him. Now, however, I know that that work is just as fraught as saintliness; that these tribulations beset anyone who is solitary for the sake of the work, just as they beset God's solitaries in their caves and bare shelters, in bygone times.

  [53] When we speak of the solitaries, we invariably take too much for granted. We suppose people know what is meant. No, they do not. They have never set eyes on a solitary; they have merely hated him without knowing him. They have been his neighbours, using him up, and the voices in the next room, tempting him. They have incited things against him, to make a noise and drown him out. Children were in league against him when he was tender and a child himself, and his growth, as he grew, was all against the grown-ups. They tracked him to his hiding-place like a hunted animal,
and through the long years of his youth there was never a closed season. And when they couldn't reduce him to exhaustion, and he escaped, they shrieked at what he had produced, and declared it ugly, and cast suspicion on it. And when he paid them no attention, they made their meaning plainer, and ate up his food and breathed up his air and spat on his poverty, to make it repugnant to him. They brought him ill repute, as if he had a contagious disease, and threw stones at him to drive him away all the faster. And in their ancient instinct they were right: for he was indeed their foe.

  But then, when he did not look up, they paused to reflect. They sensed that in all they did they were doing his will; that they had been giving him strength in his solitude, and helping him to separate from them for ever. And at this they changed their approach, and adopted their final and ultimate tactic, that other means of spurning: fame. Whenever this clamour has been made, there has hardly been a man who has not looked up, and been distracted.

  [54] Last night my thoughts turned to the little green book I must once have possessed as a boy; and I do not know why, but I imagine it to have been Mathilde Brahe's. It did not interest me when I got it, and it was several years before I read it – during my vacation at Ulsgaard, I believe. But from the very first moment, it meant a great deal to me. It was filled with resonant meaning from first to last, even in terms of externals. The green of the binding had a significance, and you recognized at once that the inside had to be as it was. As if by some prior arrangement, first there was the smooth endpaper, watered white upon white, and then the title page, which had an air of mystery. It looked as if there might well be illustrations within; but there were none, and you had to concede, almost in spite of yourself, that this too was as it should be. It made up somewhat for this when you found the thin bookmark at a particular place in the book. Brittle with age and left at a slight angle, touching in its confidence that it was still rose-coloured, it had lain between the same pages since God knows when. Perhaps it had never been used, and some conscientious bookbinder had placed it, hurriedly, inattentively. But possibly the place it marked was no accident. It might be that someone who never read another line had stopped reading at that point; that fate had knocked on his door at that moment, occupying him, taking him far away from books, which after all are not life. It was impossible to tell whether any more of the book had been read. It might equally have been that a reader had wanted to read this passage over and over again, and had done so, though sometimes not until late at night. At all events, I felt reticent about those two pages, as you might before a mirror which someone else is looking into. I never read them. Indeed, I do not know whether I read the whole book. It was not very big, but there were a great many stories in it, especially of an afternoon; then there was always one you hadn't yet read.

  I remember only two of them. Let me say which: ‘The End of Grisha Otrepyov’39 and ‘The Fall of Charles the Bold’.40

  God knows whether it made any impression on me at the time. But now, after so many years, I recall the account of how the body of the false Tsar was thrown to the mob, and lay for three days, stabbed and mutilated, a mask on its face. There is of course no likelihood at all that the little book will ever come into my hands again. But that passage must have been remarkable. I should also like to reread the description of his meeting with his mother. He will have felt very sure of himself, since he had her come to Moscow; I am even convinced that at that date he believed so powerfully in himself that he actually imagined he was summoning his own mother. And after all, this same Maria Nagoi, making the hurried days' journey from her wretched convent, had everything to gain by giving her assent. But would not his insecurity have begun precisely when she acknowledged him? I am not disinclined to think that the power of his transformation lay in no longer being the son of anyone.

  (That, after all, is the power of all young people who have left home.)*

  The fact that the people wanted him without having any clear conception of what they wanted merely made him freer and more unbridled in the possibilities before him. But his mother's avowal, even if it was a knowing deception, had the power to diminish him; it set him apart from the opulence of his invention; it limited him to weary imitation; it reduced him to the individual he was not: it made him an impostor. And now, undermining him more subtly, there was this Marina Mniszech as well, who denied him in her own fashion, for, as it subsequently appeared, she believed not in him but in anyone. Of course I cannot vouch for how much of all this was dealt with in that story. These things, it seems to me, should have been included.

  But leaving that aside, this incident is in no way out of date. We could imagine a writer of our own time who would labour meticulously over those last moments; nor would he be wrong to do so. A great deal happens in them: waking from a deep sleep, he leaps to the window, and out of the window into the courtyard, landing among the sentries. He cannot get to his feet unaided; they have to help him. Quite likely he has broken his foot. Leaning on two of the men, he senses that they believe in him. He looks around: the others believe in him too. He almost feels sorry for them, these gigantic streltsy – it must be quite a change: they knew Ivan Grozny, in all his reality, and they believe in him. He wouldn't mind enlightening them, but if he opened his mouth he'd simply scream. The pain in his foot is excruciating, and right now he thinks so little of himself that all he is aware of is the pain. And then there is no time. They come crowding round, he sees Shuisky, and behind him all the others. Presently it will be over. But his bodyguards close round him. They are not going to abandon him. And a miracle happens. The faith of these old men spreads; suddenly, no one will advance. Shuisky, right before him, calls up in desperation to an upper window. The impostor does not look round. He knows who is standing there; he realizes that silence has fallen, a sudden and total silence. Now there will be the voice, that voice he knows of old, that high, false voice that overstrains itself. And then he hears the Tsarina Mother disowning him.

  Up to this moment, the story tells itself, but now, if you please, we need someone who can tell a story, we need a storyteller: because the few lines that remain to be told must be redolent of a force that would brook no opposition. Whether it is stated or not, you must feel utterly convinced that between the voice and the pistol shot, in that infinitesimal interim, the will and the power were once again in him to be everything. Otherwise there is no understanding how gloriously logical it was that they transfixed him through his nightshirt, and stabbed him through and through in search of the hard core of the man's being. And that in death he still wore the mask, for three whole days, which he had almost laid aside.

  [55] When I think about it now, it strikes me as curious that the same book contained an account of the end of a man who for all his life was one and the same, hard and unchangeable as granite, a man who weighed ever more heavily on those who bore him up. There is a portrait of him in Dijon. But even without it, we know that he was brusque, contrary, headstrong and desperate. Only the hands are perhaps not what we should have expected. They are distinctly warm hands, continually wanting to cool themselves and involuntarily resting on anything cold, outspread, with air between the fingers. The blood might surge into those hands as it rushes to one's head, and when clenched they were really like the heads of madmen, raging with fantasies.

  To live with that blood called for an incredible caution. The Duke was sealed up with it within himself, and at times he was afraid of it, when it moved around in him, furtive and dark. Even to him it could seem terribly alien, that fleet, half- Portuguese blood that he scarcely had any knowledge of. Often he feared it might attack him as he slept and tear him apart. He behaved as though he had it in his control, but in reality he always lived in terror of it. He never dared love a woman lest it be jealous, and so raging was it that he never let wine pass his lips; rather than drink, he appeased it with compote sweetened with rose-water. On one occasion, however, he did drink, in the camp before Lausanne, when Granson was lost; he was sick, and had no o
ne, and he downed a great deal of wine, without water. But his blood was sleeping, then. During his last years, when he was out of his senses, it would sometimes fall into this heavy, bestial sleep. At such times, it was apparent just how very much he was in its power; when it slept, he was nothing. No one was allowed to enter his presence at those times; he did not understand what they were saying. He could not allow foreign envoys to see him, desolate as he was. He would sit there waiting for his blood to awaken. And mostly it would suddenly leap up and burst out from his heart and roar.

  For the sake of that blood, he carried with him all the things he cared not a farthing for. The three great diamonds and all the stones; the Flemish laces and the Arras tapestries, piles of them. His silken pavilion with its cords of braided gold, and four hundred tents for his retinue. And pictures painted on wood, and the twelve Apostles in pure silver. And the Prince of Taranto, and the Duke of Cleves, and Philip of Baden, and the seigneur of Château-Guyon. For he hoped to persuade his blood that he was emperor and nothing was above him – that it might fear him. But his blood did not believe him, despite these proofs; it was a distrustful blood. Possibly he kept it in doubt for a while. But the horns of Uri were his undoing. From that time on, his blood knew that it was lodged in a lost man – and it wanted to be out.