The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  [58] Fate loves to devise patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. Life itself, however, is difficult because of its simplicity. It consists of a few things only, of a magnitude out of all proportion to our lives. The saint, rejecting fate, chooses these and confronts God. But the circumstance that woman, in accordance with her nature, must make the same choice with regard to man, governs the fated course of all love relationships: resolute and without a fate, like an eternal being, she stands beside him as he is transformed. The woman who loves always surpasses the man who is loved, because life is greater than fate. Her devotion aspires to be infinite: that is her happiness. But the nameless grief of her love has always been this: that she is required to limit that devotion.

  No other lament has ever been raised by women: the first two letters of Héloïse contain only that, and five hundred years later it is raised by the letters of the Portuguese nun; one recognizes it as one does a bird-call. And suddenly, through the bright space of this insight, there passes that remotest of figures, Sappho,45 whom the centuries failed to find because they sought her in fate.

  [59] I have never dared buy a newspaper from him. I am not sure that he really does always have copies with him when he shuffles slowly to and fro outside the Jardin du Luxembourg, all evening long. He turns his back to the railings and his hand grazes the stone coping from which the bars rise. He renders himself so flat that many people pass by every day without ever seeing him. He does still have something of a voice left, true, and uses it to draw attention; but it is no different from a noise in a lamp or a stove, or the odd irregular dripping of water in a cave. And the world is so ordered that there are people who are forever passing by, their whole lives long, in that interval when he moves on, making less of a sound than anything else that moves, like the hand of a clock, like the shadow of the hand of a clock, like time itself.

  How wrong I was to be so disinclined to look. I am ashamed to record that often, when I was approaching him, I walked as the rest did, as if unaware of his very existence. At such moments, I'd hear something within him say ‘La Presse’, and then again, and a third time, at rapid intervals. And the people near me would turn and look for the voice. I, though, made a greater show of haste than all the rest, as if I had noticed nothing, as if I were altogether preoccupied.

  And so I was. I was preoccupied with picturing his life; I had embarked on the task of imagining him, and the effort had brought out a sweat on me. For I had to make him up as you would make up a dead man for whom no evidence and no remains exist, one who has to be constituted entirely within yourself. I now know that it helped me a little to think of all those Christs of striated ivory, unmounted from their crosses, that lie around in every antique shop. The thought of some pietà occurred, and passed again – all no doubt merely to call to my mind the particular angle at which his long face was bowed, and the desolate aftergrowth of stubble in the hollows of his cheeks, and the painful finality of the blindness in his closed-up expression, turned obliquely upwards. But there was so much besides that was very much his; for even then I grasped that nothing about him was unimportant: not the way that his jacket or coat, sitting too loosely at the back, exposed the whole of his collar, that low collar that enclosed in a wide curve his stretched-out, hollowed neck without ever touching it; not the greenish-black cravat fastened loosely about all of these; and most especially not his hat, an old, high-crowned, stiff felt hat which he wore as all blind men wear their hats, with no regard to the lines of their faces, and without the possibility of combining the accessory with their own selves to form a new unity for the outer world, but merely as some agreed extraneous item. In my cowardly refusal to look at him, I finally arrived at a point where the image of this man, often without any reason, would so powerfully and painfully distil into so harsh a misery within me that, upset by the experience, I decided to defy the growing resourcefulness of my imagination by confronting it with the external reality, and so setting it at nought. Evening was falling. I decided to walk past him attentively right away.

  Now it is important to know that spring was in the air. The wind had fallen; the side streets were long and contented; where they met other streets, buildings gleamed as fresh as new fractures in some white metal. But it was a metal that surprised by its lightness. In the broad thoroughfares, crowds of people were out and about, with scarcely any fear of the infrequent carriages. It could only be a Sunday. The towers of Saint-Sulpice stood out bright and unexpectedly high in the still air, and down the narrow, almost Roman streets you had an unlooked-for prospect of the season. In the park and outside there were so many people on the move that I did not see him right away. Or was it that I did not recognize him at first among the crowd?

  I knew at once that my image of him was valueless. The absoluteness of his misery, mitigated by no wariness and no role-playing whatsoever, was beyond the power of my imagination. I had understood neither the angle at which he was bowed nor the terror with which the insides of his eyelids seemed continually to fill him. I had never given a thought to his mouth, which was drawn in like the spout of a drain. Possibly he had his memories; but now nothing found its way into his soul any more, except every day the amorphous feel of the stone coping that his hand rubbed behind him. I had stood still, and as I took in all of this, almost in the same moment, it dawned on me that he was wearing a different hat, and a cravat that was undoubtedly kept for Sundays; it was diagonally checked in yellow and violet, and, as for the hat, it was a cheap new straw one with a green band. The colours are of no importance, of course, and it is petty of me to have remembered them. All I want to say is that, on him, they were like the softest down on a bird's breast. He himself got no pleasure from them, and who among all these people (I looked about me) could suppose that this finery was for him?

  And a thought struck me abruptly: My God, You do exist, then. There are proofs of Your existence. I had forgotten them all, and never demanded any either, for what an overwhelming obligation would come with the certainty. And yet that is what is now being shown to me. This, then, is to Your liking; this is what pleases You. If only we could learn above all else to endure, and not to judge. What things are of moment? Which are filled with grace? You alone know.

  When winter comes again, and I need a new coat – grant that I may wear it like that, while it is still new.

  [60] It is not that I want to set myself apart from them if I wear better clothes that have always been mine, and insist on having a place to live. But I am not as far as they are. I don't have the courage to live as they do. If my arm were to wither, I think I would hide it. But she (apart from this, I know nothing about her), she appeared every day in front of the café terraces, and although it was very difficult for her to take off her coat and extricate herself from her undefined garments, and others beneath them, she did not flinch at the trouble, and took so long removing one item of clothing after another that the wait was almost more than you could bear. And then there she stood before us, modest, with her withered, wasted stump, and you saw that it was a rare thing.

  No, it is not that I want to set myself apart from them; but it would be presumptuous in me to think myself their equal. I am not. I should have neither their strength nor their capability. I take my meals, and from one to the next I lead a life altogether without mystery; while they subsist almost like eternal beings. They stand at their street corners every day, even in November, and winter cannot make them cry out. The fogs come, rendering them indistinct and uncertain: there they still are. I made a journey, I fell ill, a good many things befell me: but they did not die.

  *(I do not even know how it is possible for schoolchildren to get up in the mornings in bedrooms stiff with grey-smelling cold; who gives them strength, those helter-skelter little skeletons, to hurry out into the grown-up city, into the dull end of the night, into the never-ending school day, still small, always full of anticipation, invariably late. I have no conception of the amount of support that is constantly being use
d up.)

  This city is full of people who are slowly slipping down to their level. Most of them resist at first; but then there are those faded, ageing girls who are forever giving up without a struggle, strong girls who are unused in their inmost selves, girls who have never been loved.

  Perhaps You intend me, O my God, to relinquish everything and love them. Why else do I find it so hard not to follow them when they pass me? Why do I suddenly think up the sweetest words of night, and why does my voice linger, all tenderness, between my throat and my heart? Why do I imagine how I would hold them close, right up to my breath, with an inexpressible caution, these dolls whom life has played with, flinging their arms open wide with every spring that comes, for no purpose whatsoever, till their shoulder joints grow loose? They have never fallen from a hope that was very high, and so they are not broken; but they are battered and already in too poor a state for life to have much use for them. Stray cats are the only ones that come to them in their rooms at evening, and scratch them secretly, and sleep upon them. At times I follow one down a couple of streets. They walk on past the houses, people continually screen them from my view, and they disappear beyond them as if they were merely nothing.

  And yet I know that if a man were to try to love them, they would weigh upon him, like people who have been walking too long and simply stop. I believe only Jesus could endure them, who still has the resurrection in all His limbs; but what are they to Him? It is only women in love who can seduce Him, not those who wait with a small talent for being loved, as with a lamp grown cold.46

  [61] I know that if I am destined for the very worst, it will be no help at all if I disguise myself in my best clothes. Did he not, in his own kingdom, sink to the lowest of humanity, to the very bottom, instead of rising? It is true that at times I have believed in the other kings, although their parks no longer prove a thing. But it is night, it is winter, I am freezing, I believe in him. For glory is a mere moment, and we have never seen anything longer lasting than wretchedness. But the King47 shall endure.

  Was he not the only one who bore up under his madness, like wax flowers under a bell jar? People prayed in churches that the others might have long lives, but of him Chancellor Jean Charlier de Gerson required that he live the life everlasting, and this, moreover, at a time when he was already the neediest of the needy, wretched and in abject poverty, despite his crown.

  This was in those days when men unknown to him, their faces blackened, would sometimes fall upon him in his bed, to rip off the bed-shirt that had rotted unto his very ulcers and which he had long since taken for part of himself. The room was darkened, and they tore away the foul rags from beneath his stiff arms, just as they came to hand. Then one of them brought a light, and only now did they discover the purulent sore on his chest, in which the iron amulet had become embedded because every night he pressed it to him with all the force of his ardour; now it lay deep within him, fearfully precious, in a pearly border of pus, like some miracle-working remnant bedded in a reliquary. These men had been chosen because they were tough, but they were not proof against nausea when the worms, disturbed, crawled out towards them from the Flemish fustian and, falling from the folds, crept up their sleeves somewhere or other. His condition was undoubtedly worse than in the days of the parva regina; for she had still been prepared to lie with him, young and radiant as she was. Then she had died. And since then, no one had dared bed another courtesan beside that carrion. She had not left behind the words or endearments that could bring the King relief; and so no one could penetrate the wilderness of his mind any more, no one could help him out of the abysses of his soul, and no one understood what it meant when, suddenly, there he was before them, staring the round-eyed gaze of an animal put to pasture. When he recognized the preoccupied face of Juvénal, his thoughts returned to the kingdom as it was when last he knew it. And he wanted to make good all his omissions.

  It was in the nature of the events of those times, however, that they could not be told in a manner that spared the listener. Wherever something happened, it happened with its full weight, and when it was described it seemed to be all of a piece. For how could you soften the fact that his brother had been murdered, and that yesterday Valentina Visconti, whom he had always called his dear sister, had knelt before him, lifting her black widow's weeds from a disfigured face that was all sorrow and accusation? And today a persistent, eloquent lawyer had stood there, proving that the Duke, who hired the assassin, was in the right, till it seemed the crime had become a translucent thing that would ascend, radiant, to heaven. To be just meant deciding in favour of all; for Valentina of Orléans died brokenhearted, although vengeance had been promised her. What good was it to pardon the Duke of Burgundy, and pardon him again? The dark passion of despair had him in its grip, and for weeks he had been living in a tent deep in the forest of Argilly, declaring that his one relief was to hear the stags belling in the night.

  Once all these things had been thought upon, thought through time and again from beginning to end (though the time that had passed was short), the people demanded to see him. And see him they did, and beheld him completely at a loss. The people, however, rejoiced at the sight; they knew that this was the King, this silent, patient man whose sole reason for being was that God might take action over his head, in all his tardy impatience. In these lucid moments on the balcony of his Hôtel de Saint-Pol, the King perhaps had an intuition of the progress he had made in secret; he recalled the day of Roosbecke,48 when his uncle de Berry had taken him by the hand and led him on to his first ready-made victory; there, on a November day that remained light for a remarkable time, he had surveyed the massed men of Ghent, choked off in their own tight formation when the cavalry attacked them from every side. Intertwined with one another, like some enormous brain, they lay there in the heaps they had themselves formed in order to present a solid front. His breath failed him at the sight of their smothered faces; he could not help imagining that the air had been driven out, far above these corpses (so tightly packed that they were still upright), by the sudden departure of so many despairing souls.

  The scene had been impressed upon him as the very foundation of his glory. And it had stayed with him. But if that had been the triumph of death, then this, standing here upright and weak-kneed with all these eyes upon him, was the mystery of love. From the reactions of the others he had seen that that battlefield could be understood, monstrous though it was. This, however, resisted all understanding; it was every bit as wondrous as the stag with the collar of gold in the forest of Senlis49 years ago – only that now he himself was the vision, and the others were lost in the act of looking. Nor did he doubt that they were breathless and filled with the same immense expectation that had overcome him that day, hunting in the freshness of his youth, when that quiet face had emerged peering from the thicket. The mystery of his visible presence spread over all of his gentle form; he made not the smallest movement, for fear of vanishing; and the thin smile on his broad, simple countenance took on a natural permanence, as on the faces of saints carved of stone, costing him no effort. Thus he offered himself up, in one of those moments that are eternity, seen in foreshortened form. The crowd could hardly bear it. Fortified, nurtured by a solace inexhaustibly increased, it broke the silence with a cry of joy. But above, on the balcony, there remained only Juvénal des Ursins, who called out during the next ebb in the noise that the King would be coming to the Brotherhood of the Passion in the rue Saint-Denis, to witness the Mysteries.

  On such days, the King was entirely benign and mild. If a painter of the period had wanted some idea of what life was like in paradise, he could not have found a more perfect image than the King's calmed figure as he stood beneath the sloping arches of one of the Louvre's high windows. He was turning the pages of Christine de Pisan's little book The Road of Long Study, which was dedicated to him.50 He was not reading the learned polemics of her allegorical parliament, which had undertaken to establish what sort of prince might be worthy to rule o
ver the whole world. Whenever he took it to hand, the book opened at the simplest of passages, where it spoke of the heart which, for thirteen years, like a retort on the burner of pain, had served no other purpose than to distil the water of bitterness for the eyes; he grasped that true consolation only began when happiness lay far enough in the past and was finished for good. Nothing meant more to him than that solace. And even as his gaze appeared to be fixed on the bridge beyond, he liked to see the world through Christine's heart, that heart schooled by the powerful Cumaean51 to venturesome ways in the world – the world as it was back then, with its seas to be braved, its cities with unfamiliar towers, all sealed up by vast and pressing spaces; the ecstatic loneliness of the assembled mountains; and the heavens, explored in fearful doubt, which were only now closing up like the skull of an infant.

  But whenever anyone entered, the King started, and slowly his spirit misted over. They led him away from the window and gave him something to keep him occupied, and he let them do it. They had accustomed him to spending hours poring over illustrations, and he was glad to do so, although it did vex him that, in turning the pages, you could never have several pictures before you at the same time, and they were bound fast into the folios so that you could not rearrange them. Noticing this, someone recalled a game of cards that had been completely forgotten, and the King showed favour to the man who brought him the cards, for they were colourful and crowded with figures and could be moved about individually, and were very much to his liking. And while card-playing became the fashion among his courtiers, the King sat in his library and played alone. Just as he now turned up two kings in succession, so too God had recently brought him and the Emperor Wenceslaus52 together; sometimes a queen would die, and then he would place an ace of hearts upon her, like a tombstone. He was unsurprised to find several popes in the pack; he placed Rome over there at the edge of the table, and here, below his right hand, was Avignon. Rome was of no interest to him; he imagined it to be round, for some reason or other, and left it at that. But he was familiar with Avignon.53 And scarcely had he thought of it but his memory recapitulated the lofty, hermetic palace and overtaxed itself. He closed his eyes and had to take a deep breath. He was afraid he would have bad dreams that night.