But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? In recent years I had to live through so many close experiences of death, but not one person has been taken from me without my having found the tasks around me increased. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunderstanding has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.
I clung to these words. I did not understand what they meant, but they grounded me while I felt numb, fearful, and mute. After that winter and a long spring, when I still had not started to feel better, I saw no other possibility but to heed Rilke’s advice and attach myself to pain as the path back into life. Gradually I began to understand these words—it was as much their texture and shape as their elusive meaning that encouraged me to find a way back into language and life. But it was a new way, charted through pain but also enriched by it, deeper and harder than any path I had taken before. And it was the only one. Moving forward meant moving with and through the pain rather than overcoming it, which would have meant also forgetting my father and how losing him had taught me things about myself I could not learn when he was alive. Rilke’s words did not provide the consolation that all would be well again. But the repeated reading of these letters made me realize that death does not exceed our strength: “It is the highest mark etched at the vessel’s rim: We are full whenever we reach it, and being full means (for us) a feeling of heaviness, that something is difficult…that is all.”
This collection of Rilke’s letters of condolence, gathered here from numerous far-flung editions and archives for the first time, may guide other readers in finding their way back from mourning and pain into a transformed life. Rilke often finds startlingly concrete and accessible ways of describing how pain invades us. Occasionally he hews close to conventional expressions, but when he uses existing formulations, he always modifies them slightly. Thus he speaks of the “deepest” (instead, as one would expect, of the “highest”) price we may have to pay to learn of our own strength; he remarks that loss requires a full “accounting” (in the literal sense of bookkeeping) of suffering, that someone died “into his own heart”; that time “assigns things to their proper place” (in the concrete sense of organizing a cupboard or room); or that he longs for objects “pulsing with the past.” Where possible, I have echoed these modifications and deliberate distortions of idiomatic German (and French, in the case of two letters) to preserve the vivid tone of Rilke’s letters, and their directness and sense of urgency. Rilke’s original German is more studded with dashes, hyphens, ellipses, and near-stuttering repetitions than a solid English sentence (even after Dickinson) can bear. The overall impression is of a poet for whom language is a living, breathing thing, rather than a tool with which to cast polished pearls of wisdom on a page.
In all of his work, Rilke affirms our earthly life without embellishment and with the acceptance of loss as well as the great ecstasies of love. All too often, we are distracted, prejudiced, or casual in our perception of the world. Rilke encourages us to become aware of how much in the world and in our lives we yet have to even notice, and reminds us that human life should be seen as the tremendous opportunity afforded to us to understand ourselves better. The notion of a “beyond,” as powerful as it may be to some, especially through religious texts on overcoming grief, provides no consolation for Rilke since it makes the deceased less approachable, and also makes us less real to ourselves. We live in the here and now after all, and any longing for another realm simply distracts us from this fact.
Not every letter in this selection from Rilke’s correspondence directly concerns a death of a beloved person. He also addresses with great tact and sensitivity the painful dissolution of a deep and loving friendship and even, in a touching letter to his erstwhile lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, the loss of a beloved pet. Other letters try to diminish our terrible dread of extinction by making clearer that death may be the side of life that is turned away from us, but that it completes our existence into the fullness of being.
Shortly before his own death of leukemia in 1926 at the age of fifty-one, Rilke despaired that he had not succeeded, in spite of the monumental achievements of his poetry and the letters which proved so vitally important for so many, in finding a way to face death with equanimity. Nevertheless, he had used his abhorrence of the idea of extinction as fuel for transformation and deeper understanding. From the published recollections of his longtime confidante Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, a woman of rare sensitivity, we know that Rilke suffered greatly during his final weeks. But he left us a cache of the most profound and extraordinary writings about death, which reach beyond his own existence to touch, inspire, and perhaps provide aid.
The book concludes with Rilke’s letter to his Polish translator, in which Rilke explains how to understand the interplay of death and life, of give and take, as the totality of everything that may be experienced by us. Our task here on earth is to truly and fully experience our existence with our senses, and to transform these sensory perceptions in the deepest layers of our inner being. Then mute feeling can become expression; then pain can be imparted to ourselves and others, and lead back to life. Then, in a case as rare as Rilke’s, a reflection on the inescapable reality of our death can become poetry. The loved ones whom we have lost are included in this task of transforming our experiences deep within us. It is our mission to recall our shared life with them in what Rilke calls “the invisible,” by which he means that mysterious realm of spirit, memory, and intention that guides our purpose and our actions among the living.
TO MIMI ROMANELLI
Mimi Romanelli (1877–1970), the younger sister of the Italian art dealer and archaeologist Pietro Romanelli, was known for her beauty and musical talent. Rilke stayed in her family’s small hotel in Venice in 1907. They had a romantic relationship and maintained a long correspondence.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1907
Oberneuland near Bremen (Germany)
There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape. Of a long-ripened death that effaces its hateful name and is nothing but a gesture that returns those laws to the anonymous universe which have been recognized and rescued over the course of an intensely accomplished life. It is this idea of death which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next, and which compels me to humbly endure the small death, so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.
I am not ashamed, my dear, to have cried on a recent early Sunday morning in a cold gondola as it was gliding around endless corners through parts of Venice so vaguely visible that they seemed to extend into another city far away. The voice of the barcaiolo who called out to be granted passage at the corner of a canal received no answer, as in the face of death.
And the bells that I had heard in my room only moments before (my room where I have lived a whole life, where I was born and where I am preparing to die) seemed so clear to me; those same bells trailed their sounds like rags behind them over the swirling waters, only to reconnect without recognition.
It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so t
hat this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.
And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, beautiful one. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms. Finally: happy.
TO COUNTESS LILI KANITZ-MENAR
Lili Kanitz-Menar (1869–1943) was the great-niece of Rilke’s acquaintance Countess Luise Schwerin (1846–1906) in whose memory he wrote the poem “Experience of Death” (1907). She performed as a concert singer and conductor under the name Lili Menar.
JULY 16, 1908 (EVENING)
Paris, 17, rue Campagne-Première
I thank you, my dear friend, for having written to me. Fifty times I’ve wanted to respond since receiving your letter, but couldn’t get to it. There is so much that I need to get through right now: I mean in my work, and I don’t have quite as much energy as I ought to. And then, to add to all of this, this incommensurate event. What is one supposed to say? How should one account for it? It is always the same question. Over the past few years, I have had to ask myself this question several times. The death of Countess Schwerin and my father’s death (each of which provided me with an experience of infinite greatness and magnanimity) have resulted in the fact that I no longer fear this question. And yet it is difficult to have to face it again so closely, even in the brightest day. And in this most recent case, it is complicated by so many things: Who was this woman who lived for other people and yet, beneath everything and without knowing or admitting to it, harbored the demands of an entire life within her as if they had been left there entirely touched, so that one could often get the idea that she was also the opposite of what she wanted to be, and that both of these states would be equally true and equally unreal? And finally, what sort of relationship did one have with her, in which fondness and even admiration was so oddly compatible with resistance, rejection, and harsh judgments that one never dared to fully take stock of it and arrive at a net total? And for quite some time I experienced the kindness she displayed toward me and which eventually turned into a friendship—I don’t know when—rather as a beautifully executed legacy from the wonderful sister who preceded her, than as an actual gift from her. In trying to make sense of this, I only move further away from any insight into this person. Today, my attitude toward death is that it frightens me more in those whom I failed to truly encounter and who remained inexplicable or disastrous to me, than it does in those whom I loved with certainty when they were alive, even if they burst only for a brief moment into the radiant transfiguration of intimacy which love can reach. If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.
This is why I agree with you, my dear friend, when you say that you mourn those “who go away.” Alas, only those can go away from us whom we never possessed. And we cannot even grieve the fact of never really having possessed this one or that one: We would have neither time nor strength nor justification for doing so. For already the most fleeting experience of true possession (or of having something in common with another person, which is after all only double possession) flings us back into ourselves with such enormous force and requires so much of us to do there, and demands such extremely solitary development, that it would be enough to keep all of us occupied individually forever.
Is that not the case?
The letter before your last one conveyed such good news that I now wish a thousand times that your current travels and your inner resolve will very soon lead to more such news, and that you will not be remiss in sending them to me. Clara is busy at work and produces beautiful things. I will see her at the end of the week.
Your loyally devoted friend
RMRilke
TO ELISABETH FREIIN SCHENK ZU SCHWEINSBERG
Schenk zu Schweinsberg (1886–1955) was a German painter. Rilke met her during a stay on Capri in 1908 at the house of her aunt Alice Faehndrich, who died that same year.
SEPTEMBER 23, 1908
Paris, 77, rue de Varenne
Dear Miss von Schenk,
You’ve done a good deed to receive my unduly late letter without reproach and as a matter of course, just in the manner I had hoped to write to you for quite some time. Although your insight and fairness are so generous that you do not consider me obligated to respond, my joy at receiving your letter this morning was so great that I would have to quarry fifteen minutes out of even the most compressed time to compose a brief and grateful response, like a small and inconspicuous stone set into the ring of thoughts that have gathered around your news.
It is quite after my own heart that you are sending good news from a steady inner core, which seeks to preserve its position and strength in the face of everything. What you say about your honorable aunt’s passing is in line with my own feeling: that we do not have to be sad for her. But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? In recent years I had to live through so many close experiences of death, but not one person has been taken from me without my having found the tasks around me increased. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunderstanding has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.
You gave such a sweet turn to my personal melancholy memories with the glimpse of the small childhood picture, which I have studied quite attentively. I am sending it back to you already since nobody likes to think of such objects to be out of the home and in transit.
How much childhood is in that picture, and how everything is already settled there in the quiet, so indescribably lonely state of being a child, at the time when seated in an armchair one cannot touch the floor and with immense courage just keeps sitting there in that vast space which begins all around one and goes on and on. It is a very sweet and meaningful small picture. Thank you for letting me see it.
Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.
With the most loyal devotion,
Yours,
RMRilke
TO SIDONIE NÁDHERNÁ VON BORUTÍN
Nádherná von Borutín (1885–1950) was the host of a well-known salon and the partner of the Viennese writer and journalist Karl Kraus. She first met Rilke in 1906 and maintained a long friendship and correspondence with him. Her brother Johannes Nádherný von Borutín (1884–1913) committed suicide.
AUGUST 1, 1913
Currently Baltic Sea Spa, Heiligendamm, Mecklenburg
Grand Hôtel
My dear Sidie,
Your letter really touches my heart. On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength. But on the other hand, I am very conc
erned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence (how much more reliably I feel my father to be effective and helpful in me since he no longer dwells among us). Just think how much in our daily lives misleads and troubles us, and renders another person’s love imprecise for us. But now he is definitely here, now he is completely free to be here and we are completely free to feel him…Haven’t you felt your father’s influence and compassion a thousand times from the universe where all, truly all, Sidie, is beyond loss? Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease. Whatever had such steady influence on us had already been a reality independent of all the circumstances familiar to us here. This is precisely why we experienced it as something so different and independent of an actual need: Because from the very beginning, it had no longer been aimed at and determined by our existence here. All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both. I know individuals who already face both the one and the other without fear and with the same love—for is life really more demystified and safely entrusted to us than that other condition? Are not both conditions in a place namelessly beyond us, out of reach? We are true and pure only in our willingness to be part of the whole, the undecided, the great, the greatest. Alas, if I could tell you just how I know it, then deep within your mourning, a tiny kernel of dark joy would take shape. Make it your ambition to take heart. Start doing so this very evening by playing Beethoven; he also was committed to the whole.
The Dark Interval Page 2