Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Today I really didn’t expect it; I went out so bravely, as if that were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. And yet something happened again that took me up and crumpled me like a piece of paper and threw me away: something incredible.

  The Boulevard Saint-Michel lay in front of me, empty and vast, and it was easy to walk along its gentle slope. Window-casements overhead opened with a clear, glassy sound, and their brilliance flew over the street like a white bird. A carriage with bright red wheels rolled past, and farther down someone was carrying something green. Horses in their glittering harnesses trotted along the dark, freshly sprinkled boulevard. The wind was brisk and mild, and everything was rising: odors, cries, bells.

  I came to one of those cafes where false red gypsies perform in the evening. From the open windows, the air of the previous night crept out with a bad conscience. Sleek-haired waiters were busy sweeping in front of the door. One of them was bent over, tossing handful after handful of yellowish sand under the tables. A passerby stopped, nudged him, and pointed down the street. The waiter, who was all red in the face, looked sharply in that direction for a moment or two; then a laugh spread over his beardless cheeks, as if it had been spilled across them. He gestured to the other waiters, turned his laughing face quickly from right to left several times, to call everyone over without missing anything himself. Now they all stood there, seeing or trying to see what was happening down the street, smiling or annoyed that they hadn’t yet found out what was so funny.

  I felt a slight fear beginning inside me. Something was urging me to cross the street; but all I did was start to walk faster; and when I looked at the few people in front of me, I didn’t notice anything unusual. I did see that one of them, an errand-boy with a blue apron and an empty basket slung over one shoulder, was staring at someone. When he had seen enough, he turned around toward the houses and gestured to a laughing clerk across the street, moving his finger in front of his forehead with that circular motion whose meaning everyone knows. Then his dark eyes flashed and he came toward me, swaggering and content.

  I expected that as soon as I had a better view I would see some extraordinary and striking figure; but it turned out that there was no one in front of me except a tall, emaciated man in a dark coat, with a soft black hat on his short, faded-blond hair. I was sure there was nothing laughable about this man’s clothing or behavior, and was already trying to look past him down the boulevard, when he tripped over something. Since I was walking close behind him I was on my guard, but when I came to the place, there was nothing there, absolutely nothing. We both kept walking, he and I, with the same distance between us. Now there was an intersection; the man in front of me hopped down from the sidewalk on one leg, the way children, when they are happy, will now and then hop or skip as they walk. On the other side of the street, he simply took one long step up onto the sidewalk. But almost immediately he raised one leg slightly and hopped on the other, once, quite high, and then again and again. This time too you might easily have thought the man had tripped over some small object on the corner, a peach pit, a banana peel, anything; and the strange thing was that he himself seemed to believe in the presence of an obstacle: he turned around every time and looked at the offending spot with that half-annoyed, half-reproachful expression people have at such moments. Once again some intuition warned me to cross the street, but I didn’t listen to it; I continued to follow this man, concentrating all my attention on his legs. I must admit I felt very relieved when for about twenty steps the hopping didn’t recur; but as I looked up, I noticed that something else had begun to annoy the man. His coat collar had somehow popped up; and as hard as he tried to fold it back in place, first with one hand, then with both at once, it refused to budge. This kind of thing can happen. It didn’t upset me. But then I saw, with boundless astonishment, that in his busy hands there were two distinct movements: one a quick, secret movement that flipped up the collar, while the other one, elaborate, prolonged, exaggeratedly spelled out, was meant to fold it back down. This observation disconcerted me so greatly that two minutes passed before I recognized in the man’s neck, behind his hunched-up coat and his nervously scrambling hands, the same horrible, bisyllabic hopping that had just left his legs. From this moment I was bound to him. I saw that the hopping was wandering through his body, trying to break out here or there. I understood why he was afraid of people, and I myself began to examine the passersby, cautiously, to see if they noticed anything. A cold twinge shot down my spine when his legs suddenly made a small, convulsive leap; but no one had seen it, and I decided that I would also trip slightly if anyone began to look. That would certainly be a way of making them think there had been some small, imperceptible object on the sidewalk, which both of us had happened to step on. But while I was thinking about how I could help, he himself had found a new and excellent device. I forgot to mention that he had a cane; it was an ordinary cane, made of dark wood, with a plain, curved handle. In his anxious searching, he had hit upon the idea of holding this cane against his back, at first with one hand (who knows what he might still need the other hand for), right along his spine, pressing it firmly into the small of his back and sliding the curved end under his collar, in such a way that you felt it standing behind the cervical and first dorsal vertebrae like a neck-brace. This posture didn’t look strange; at most it was a bit cocky, but the unexpected spring day might excuse that. No one thought of turning around to look, and now everything was all right. Perfectly all right. True, at the next intersection two hops escaped, two small, half-suppressed hops, but they didn’t amount to anything; and the one really visible leap was so skillfully timed (just at the spot where a hose was lying across the sidewalk) that there was nothing to be afraid of. Yes, everything was still all right; from time to time his other hand too seized the cane and pressed it in more firmly, and right away the danger was again overcome. But I couldn’t keep my anxiety from growing. I knew that as he walked and with infinite effort tried to appear calm and detached, the terrible spasms were accumulating inside his body; I could feel the anxiety he felt as the spasms grew and grew, and I saw how he clutched his cane when the shaking began inside him. The expression of his hands became so severe and relentless then that I placed all my hope in his willpower, which was bound to be strong. But what could mere willpower do? The moment had to come when his strength would be exhausted; it couldn’t be long now. And I, who followed him with my heart pounding, I gathered my little strength together like money and, gazing at his hands, I begged him to take it if it could be of any use.

  I think he took it; is it my fault that it wasn’t enough?

  At the Place Saint-Michel there were many vehicles, and pedestrians hurrying here and there; several times we were caught between two carriages, and then he would take a breath and relax a bit, and there would be a bit of hopping and nodding. Perhaps that was the trick by which the imprisoned illness hoped to subdue him. His willpower had cracked in two places, and the damage had left in his possessed muscles a gentle, alluring stimulation and this compelling two-beat rhythm. But the cane was still in its place, and the hands looked annoyed and angry. As we stepped onto the bridge, it was all right. It was still all right. But now his walk became noticeably uncertain; first he ran two steps, then he stopped. Stopped. His left hand gently let go of the cane, and rose so slowly that I could see it tremble in the air. He pushed his hat back slightly and drew his hand across his brow. He turned his head slightly, and his gaze wobbled over sky, houses, and water, without grasping a thing. And then he gave in. The cane was gone, he stretched out his arms as if he were trying to fly, and some kind of elemental force exploded from him and bent him forward and dragged him back and made him keep nodding and bowing and flung a horrible dance out of him into the midst of the crowd. For he was already surrounded by people, and I could no longer see him.

  What sense would there have been in going anywhere now; I was empty. Like a blank piece of paper, I drifted along past the houses, up the b
oulevard again.

  [THE BIRD-FEEDERS]

  I don’t underestimate it. I know it takes courage. But let us suppose for a moment that someone had it, this courage de luxe to follow them, in order to know for ever (for who could forget it again or confuse it with anything else?) where they creep off to afterward and what they do with the rest of the long day and whether they sleep at night. That especially should be ascertained: whether they sleep. But it will take more than courage. For they don’t come and go like other people, whom it would be child’s play to follow. They are here and then gone, put down and snatched away like toy soldiers. The places where they can be found are somewhat out-of-the-way, but by no means hidden. The bushes recede, the path curves slightly around the lawn: there they are, with a large transparent space around them, as if they were standing under a glass dome. You might think they were pausing, absorbed in their thoughts, these inconspicuous men, with such small, in every way unassuming bodies. But you are wrong. Do you see the left hand, how it is grasping for something in the slanted pocket of the old coat? how it finds it and takes it out and holds the small object in the air, awkwardly, attracting attention? In less than a minute, two or three birds appear, sparrows, which come hopping up inquisitively. And if the man succeeds in conforming to their very exact idea of immobility, there is no reason why they shouldn’t come even closer. Finally one of them flies up, and flutters nervously for a while at the level of that hand, which is holding out God knows what crumbs of used-up bread in its unpretentious, explicitly renunciatory fingers. And the more people gather around him—at a suitable distance, of course—the less he has in common with them. He stands there like a candle that is almost consumed and burns with the small remnant of its wick and is all warm with it and has never moved. And all those small, foolish birds can’t understand how he attracts, how he tempts them. If there were no onlookers and he were allowed to stand there long enough, I’m certain that an angel would suddenly appear and, overcoming his disgust, would eat the stale, sweetish breadcrumbs from that stunted hand. But now, as always, people keep that from happening. They make sure that only birds come; they find this quite sufficient and assert that he expects nothing else. What else could it expect, this old, weather-beaten doll, stuck into the ground at a slight angle, like a painted figurehead in an old sea-captain’s garden? Does it stand like that because it too had once been placed somewhere on the forward tip of its life, at the point where motion is greatest? Is it now so washed out because it was once so bright? Will you go ask it?

  Only don’t ask the women anything when you see them feeding the birds. You could even follow them; they do it just in passing; it would be easy. But leave them alone. They don’t know how it happens. All at once they have a whole purseful of bread, and they hold out large pieces from under their flimsy shawls, pieces that are a bit chewed and soggy. It does them good to think that their saliva is getting out into the world a little, that the small birds will fly off with the taste of it in their mouths, even though a moment later they naturally forget it again.

  [IBSEN]

  There I sat before your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them as the others do, who don’t leave you in one piece but chip off their little portion and go away satisfied. For I still didn’t understand fame, that public demolition of someone who is in the process of becoming, whose building-site the mob breaks into, knocking down his stones.

  Young man anywhere, in whom something is welling up that makes you shiver, be grateful that no one knows you. And if those who think you are worthless contradict you, and if those whom you call your friends abandon you, and if they want to destroy you because of your precious ideas: what is this obvious danger, which concentrates you inside yourself, compared with the cunning enmity of fame, later, which makes you innocuous by scattering you all around?

  Don’t ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don’t take this more seriously than anything else you might find in their mouths. Think rather that it has become cheapened, and throw it away. Take another name, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone.

  Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have caught up with you because of your fame. A little while ago they were against you body and soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they pull your words around with them in the cages of their presumption, and exhibit them in the streets, and tease them a little, from a safe distance. All your terrifying wild beasts.

  When I first read you, these words broke loose and fell upon me in my wilderness, in all their desperation. As desperate as you yourself became in the end, you whose course is drawn incorrectly on every chart. Like a crack it crosses the heavens, this hopeless hyperbola of your path, which curves toward us only once, then recedes again in terror. What did you care if a woman stayed or left, if this man was seized by vertigo and that one by madness, if the dead were alive and the living seemed dead: what did you care? It was all so natural for you; you passed through it the way someone might walk through a vestibule, and didn’t stop. But you lingered, bent over, where our life boils and precipitates and changes color: inside. Farther in than anyone has ever been; a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight. In there, where, mistrustful, you wouldn’t take anyone with you, in there you sat and discerned transitions. And there, since your blood drove you not to form or to speak, but to reveal, there you made the enormous decision to so magnify these tiny events, which you yourself first perceived only in test tubes, that they would be seen by thousands of people, immense before them all. Your theater came into being. You couldn’t wait until this life almost without spatial reality, this life which had been condensed by the weight of the centuries into a few small drops, could be discovered by the other arts: until it could gradually be made visible to a few connoisseurs who, little by little, acquire insight and finally demand to see these august rumors confirmed in the parable of the scene opened in front of them. You couldn’t wait for that; you were there, and everything that is barely measurable—an emotion that rises by half a degree, the angle of deflection, read off from up close, of a will burdened by an almost infinitesimal weight, the slight cloudiness in a drop of longing, and that barely perceptible color-change in an atom of confidence—all this you had to determine and record. For it is in such reactions that life existed, our life, which had slipped into us, had drawn back inside us so deeply that it was hardly possible even to make conjectures about it any more.

  Because you were a revealer, a timelessly tragic poet, you had to transform this capillary action all at once into the most convincing gestures, into the most available forms. So you began that unprecedented act of violence in your work, which, more and more impatiently, desperately, sought equivalents in the visible world for what you had seen inside. There was a rabbit there, an attic, a room where someone was pacing back and forth; there was a clatter of glass in a nearby bedroom, a fire outside the windows; there was the sun. There was a church, and a rock-strewn valley that was like a church. But this wasn’t enough: finally towers had to come in and whole mountain-ranges; and the avalanches that bury landscapes spilled onto a stage overwhelmed with what is tangible, for the sake of what cannot be grasped. Then you could do no more. The two ends, which you had bent together until they touched, sprang apart; your demented strength escaped from the flexible wand, and your work was as if it had never existed.

  If this hadn’t happened, who could understand why in the end you refused to go away from the window, obstinate as you always were? You wanted to see the people passing by; for the thought had occurred to you that someday you might make something out of them, if you decided to begin.

  [COSTUMES]

  When I think about it now, I can’t help being astonished that I always managed to completely return from the world of these fevers and was able to adjust to that social existence where
everyone wanted to be reassured that they were among familiar objects and people, where they all conspired to remain in the realm of the intelligible. If you looked forward to something, it either came or didn’t come, there was no third possibility. There were Things that were sad, once and for all, and there were pleasant Things, and a great number of incidental ones. And if a joy was arranged for you, it was in fact a joy, and you had to behave accordingly. All this was basically very simple, and once you got the knack of it, it took care of itself. For everything entered into these appointed boundaries: the long, monotonous school hours, when it was summer outside; the walks that afterward you had to describe in French; the visitors into whose presence you were summoned and who thought you were amusing, just when you were feeling sad, and laughed at you the way people laugh at the melancholy expression of certain birds, who don’t have any other face. And of course the birthday parties, to which children were invited whom you hardly knew, embarrassed little girls who made you embarrassed, or rude little boys who scratched your face, and broke the presents you had just received, and then suddenly left when all the toys had been pulled out of their boxes and wrappings and were lying piled up on the floor. But when you played by yourself, as always, it could happen that you inadvertently stepped out of this agreed-upon, generally harmless world, and found yourself in circumstances that were completely different, and unimaginable.

  At times Mademoiselle had her migraine, which was extremely violent, and these were the days when I was hard to find. I know that on these occasions the coachman was sent to look for me in the park when Father happened to ask for me and I wasn’t there. From one of the upper guest-rooms I could see him running out and calling my name at the entrance to the long tree-lined driveway. These rooms were situated, side by side, in the gable of Ulsgaard and, since we very seldom had house-guests in those days, were almost always empty. But adjoining them was that large corner room that attracted me to it so powerfully. There was nothing in it except an old bust of Admiral Juel, I think, but all around, the walls were paneled with deep, gray wardrobes, so that the window had had to be installed in the bare, whitewashed space above them. In one of the wardrobe doors I had found a key, and it opened all the others. So in a short time I had examined everything: eighteenth-century chamberlains’ coats, cold with their inwoven silver threads, and the beautiful embroidered vests that went with them; official costumes of the Order of Danneborg and the Order of the Elephant, so rich and ceremonious, with linings so soft when you touched them, that at first you thought they were women’s dresses. Then real gowns which, held out by their panniers, hung stiffly like marionettes from some too-large puppet show, now so completely outmoded that their heads had been taken off and used for some other purpose. But alongside these, there were wardrobes that were dark when you opened them, dark with high-buttoned uniforms that seemed much more worn than all the others and that wished they had never been preserved.