Yours,
Rainer
Please give my very best to Charlie.
TO ILSE ERDMANN
Between 1913 and 1922, Erdmann (1879–1924) corresponded with Rilke about his work and various challenges in her life. Rilke responded in twenty letters, which are thought to have prevented her from attempting suicide. The two met in the summer of 1917, in Munich. This letter refers to the death of Erdmann’s nephew, which she experienced like the death of her own child.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1915
[…]
What I really would like to hear much more about at the right time is that knot of coincidences which, as you suggest, is actually what keeps you confined in bodily pain. Is it possible to say more about this? I may be able to aid your response by venturing a guess. I suspect that similar experiences have also gotten me entangled in my bodily condition, which in general seems incredibly difficult to me in its duality of thing and me. In my case, there is the additional fact that although I have not had any extreme experiences of bodily pain, I’ve been extremely sensitive to suffering from an early age. I tend to think of physical pain as so utterly senseless that as soon as it appears, my soul yields to it as if the pain simply pushed it out of the space it usually occupies. I cannot abide pain as anything but at most an experience of intensity, and as something that teaches us what intensity can be long before we encounter it again for an instant in joy, in ecstasy, or during a period of very focused work. I would like to think that very young children pass through incredible intensities of joy, pain, and sleep, and that there are later periods when physical suffering basically remains the only example of intensity for us, because life otherwise mostly leads us to distraction.
In the process of dying, however, physical pain must often be a nasty irritation since it is surely our most present and immediate experience and thus, so to speak, not valid in relation to the general realm toward which the dying person directs himself. Pain’s stubborn emphasis of a specific location forces us to become one-sided and probably contradicts the dying person’s inclination to try to become part of the world more broadly. Of course this will still be accomplished entirely by present means, but to make these earthly means our own, to achieve a kind of completion in our relationships with the earth, and to inexpressibly, indescribably, breathlessly exist in the here and now: Wouldn’t this be the only option for us to finally be included in more than only our earthly existence? I think we have to experience boundlessness through our incapacity to measure even the measurable. That is why Kierkegaard includes us in the seriousness of death, without attributing to us a time limit or an eternal future beyond it. To understand and passionately exhaust our physical presence on earth as one side of being in itself would be the demand placed by death on us while life, where one simply recognizes it as real, is everywhere all of life.
I remember Rodin’s exasperation when Francis Jammes repeated Van Tieghem’s claim that the seeds of certain flowers had arrived on earth from other stars, trapped inside meteorites. Rodin knew how much we have yet to accomplish here (indeed, what not?!) and very decidedly did not want our curiosity turned beyond and away from what is here. And yet even that is possible: to have the starred skies closely wrapped around one’s heart. This is how you experienced it, I think, during those recent evening walks across the meadows when you recalled what you had learned earlier about the stars. I would have liked to have been with you then, to look up next to you and to learn something. What period of your childhood may that have been when someone recited to you the names of the stars—who? I realize that I know very little of your childhood. Almost nothing.
RMR
TO ADELHEID FRANZISKA VON DER MARWITZ
Adelheid Franziska von der Marwitz (1894–1944) was the sister of the German poet Bernhard von der Marwitz (1890–1918) who died during World War I and had maintained a correspondence with Rilke. Her brother’s frequent recitations of Rilke’s poetry introduced her to the literary culture of her time. A dedication in a book that he gave to his sister before his death quotes a poem from Rilke’s The Book of Images (1902).
JANUARY 14, 1919
Munich, Ainmillerstrasse 34/IV
My dear and honored Miss:
Only illness could excuse a silence of the kind that I have now observed against you for months—and I would like to assure you that I am ill, if I think how much any sort of communication exceeds my strengths even with people toward whom I feel as much of a motivation and motive to write such as you. While speaking, I occasionally still get over the inhibitions that invaded my most immediate nature during the devastation of these horrific years. When actually facing another human being, I gather myself for his sake (perhaps drawing a bit on his strength), but when I am supposed to approach someone with my pen, I grow tired as if in deep sand. And yet the fact that Christmas would have passed without even the smallest sign of my thoughts for you on its way, I would hardly have thought possible. And I have now also failed in this instance, for time passed with all of its external pressures and the many demands that I did not meet. But I may assure you that during the few moments of more solemn and somewhat festive contemplation that the presence of a Christmas tree always prompts in me, my recollections did not just fleetingly touch upon you but I have truly thought of you, have gathered my thoughts near you, and my thinking has—let me be precise—been able to come to rest near you. And there was a moment when I was filled with the determination that we would soon be granted an actual meeting in person where we could really speak to one another, which would allow me to make up for the sin of my silence.
I ultimately did not live in the rooms with the expansive park views that your brother had intended for me to inhabit in a vivid gesture of true friendship. But it is nonetheless not at all strange for me to think of Friedersdorf, which somehow has become familiar through my young and dear friend’s desire to host me there sometime. I’d like to imagine that I do not need to guess but that I can rely on a feeling of unerring certainty in thinking of the house to which I am now all the more demonstrably connected by the strength of his beautiful and beautifully chosen endowment. I have to assume that all of my belongings in Paris have been lost but now, since I have a few rooms of my own here, a new collection of books is gradually starting to grow. Among its most supreme foundations is the beautiful edition of the “Odes” (by [Paul] Claudel). It connects me to things I have had to forgo forever but that are also unspeakably impossible to lose by nature: to the friend who gives himself again and again through these books, and to Paris which remains so intricately transformative in my life.
Whether [the poet Emile] Verhaeren was one of the authors whom Bernhard von Marwitz especially admired, and whether he read to you from his books during the evenings in Friedersdorf? This great poet who was so gruesomely killed during the war at the Rouen train station was also a wonderful and great friend to me. I will tell you about him one day, how he was able to increasingly direct all of the force and effort that human beings apply to God back to those humans in whom he had such faith, expectation, and radiant joy. In fact, he thought of redirecting in this way the faith of a great and powerful believer. He was such an insurmountable friend precisely because of this direct and radiant faith in human beings. He suspected that every person could be capable of being the most pure and most magnificent, and he was blissfully willing to do nothing so much as to admire. I lost with him, this great man, the individual who knew how to most insistently encourage me to meet my obligations. Even though he could never read a line of my writings, he believed in them with boisterous optimism, and I knew he thought me capable of exactly that which would be my innermost joy to achieve. I recall all of this with particularly deep emotion since I now hold in my hands his final book, Les Flammes hautes [1917]. I have been reading aloud from it for the past three days almost without interruption. If you could only be here with me so I could share with you the happine
ss of these great poems, they would let you realize what we all now need most urgently: that transience is not separation. For we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have left us—and they and we are at once united in one being in which separation is just as unthinkable. Would we otherwise be able to understand such poems, if they were only the statements of a future dead person? Don’t they address—inside of us—besides the present conditions also continually something unlimited and unrecognizable? Yes, I think that the spirit cannot make itself so small that it concerns nothing but our existence in the here and now: Where it rushes toward us, we are both the living and the dead.
I realize only now to what extent the contributions I assembled for the Yearbook [an anthology edited by Rilke’s publisher] all serve this conviction, which has been confirmed for me via “Experience” [a prose piece by Rilke], recounted as precisely as possible, and to which I also allude in the grotesque poem “Death.” The person leaning against the tree became, so to speak, the more expressive marker of the scale calibrating between life and death. It is an image I cannot use without remembering how Romain Rolland once played for me a small musical fragment which came (he assured me) from antiquity and that was nothing but a gravestone inscription in notes. Before I knew back then what this music was meant to express, I described to him that it gave me the sensation of the movement of two pans of a single scale quietly settling into equilibrium, and I nearly shuddered with joy when he confessed that it was an epitaphium that had been found carved on a stele dating to the fifth century before Christ. But the peculiar “Experience” of the person leaning into the tree, which is hard to describe, means to me—I almost want to say—the natural induction into an even deeper and more invisibly grasped balance, for which the image of a scale is no longer needed. This gentle, mere presence of a human being, of someone alive, on the side of death is like the magical situation in that Greek poem where two lovers trade outfits and join in an embrace, now confused and confounded in each other’s clothing and warmth. It constitutes a quiet and loving exchange of what is external, while the blissful hesitation of the modulation is close to becoming purest certainty.
The poem “Death” finally conjures up the moment when (while I was standing one night on the beautiful bridge in Toledo) a shooting star which fell through outer space in a taut and slow curve passed at the same time (how shall I put this?) through inner space: The dividing contour of the body was no longer there. And just as sight had done in this case, at an earlier time my hearing had announced to me this unity: Once on Capri, while I was standing under the olive trees in the garden one night, a bird call that forced me to close my eyes was at once inside of me and outside, as if in a single, undivided space of absolute extension and clarity!
Since I have now told you all of this, may I also send you the Almanac [a sample of new writings] published by Insel? Even the beautiful poem by Countess [Anna de] Noailles will now, with the awareness of those connections, not seem random to you. And allow me the pleasure of recommending some books to you in the future and of occasionally sending you one that I like: Verhaeren’s Flammes hautes, for example, as soon as I receive more copies! It’s still slow and complicated with French books!
Yours,
Rilke
TO LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ
The Russian-born writer Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) was the first woman to become a psychoanalyst under the supervision of Sigmund Freud. In 1897, while in an open marriage, Andreas-Salomé began a romantic relationship of several years with Rilke. She introduced him to Russia and mentored his career as a poet. They remained friends and corresponded until Rilke’s death; Rilke wrote his last letter to her. Her dog Drushok died in 1919.
JANUARY 21, 1919
Munich, 34 Ainmillerstrasse, IV
My dear Lou,
I owe it to several peculiarly and irrefutably urgent circumstances, in spite of my difficulties with writing, that in this hour of death it has been possible for me to be with you in more tangible ways. (Among them a visit to the Fürstenhäuser guesthouse, which I entered for the first time since—“back then.”)
Your letter recalled to my heart the depth of your devotion to your little friend. You are now living through days of suffering, and yet I know that you especially will experience these moments as a specific way of growing more familiar and closer.
To account for the duration of one of these small heart-star’s orbits is, of course, also an initiation into one’s own life, and even though these cheerful moons reflect the purest world-sun for us, perhaps it was their always averted side through which we were related to the infinite life-realm beyond.—
Wonderful that you have worked so much and with such youthful joy: eight books safely in the vault!—
I have made a commitment to sit at home and see nobody (with the possible exception of [Rudolf] Kassner and two or three others). A good time to ask you for “Rodinka” [Andreas-Salomé’s memoir of her childhood]; I hesitate only because I wonder whether I’d rather have you read it to me (as you did for Ilse)? There have been so many times already where it has become urgent that we see one another, and then each time the moment passed because I was so weighed down by all sorts of inhibitions. You are not by chance thinking of visiting Munich?
You probably know the Ainmillerstrasse, if you have ever visited the old [author Eduard von] Keyserling (I can’t remember whether that had actually happened). It is a side street off Leopoldstrasse, the third one to the left, after you’ve passed Georgen- and Franz-Josef-Strasse. The view from my room (which is an artist’s studio) is over rooftops, and in the distance rises the tower and dome of the Church of St. Ursula. Just before dusk it often looks a bit Italian, like those inlays made of pieces of marble which travelers used to bring back from Florence in the past.
I did not see [the author] Ellen Delp very much and then only with instinctual caution. She lives, I think, from believing that things will “just work out,” and in this way she cannot be entirely true.
Thank you, Lou; this brief epistolary get-together has done me a lot of good, on the inside.
Rainer
TO ADELHEID VON DER MARWITZ
(See letter dated January 14, 1919.)
SEPTEMBER 11, 1919
Soglio (Bergell, Graubünden)
My dear young friend:
The joy brought by your letter has many sides: Let me recount at least a few. First, this is what we welcome now above all, that human beings are making a new start here and there to rebuild life with the strength and the faith of their indestructible hearts. There are others who could try this but who still just stand there, staring and trying to make sense of it all, and for whom sadness and sloth finally become utterly insurmountable. And this even though, based on feeling and reflection, only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself somewhere to nature with unconditional purpose, to what is strong, striving, and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if it can happen only in the least important, daily matters. Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance, we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually absorb the past inside of us. We dissolve the foreign body of pain of which we know neither its actual consistency and makeup nor how many (perhaps) life-affirming stimuli it imparts, once it has been dissolved, to our blood!
Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual, because its innermost essence is not contrary to us (as one may occasionally suspect), but it is more knowing about life than we are in our most vital moments. I always think that such a great weight, with its tremendous pressure, somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. I gained this experience very early on through various circumstances, a
nd it was then confirmed from pain to pain: What is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it. For where else should we direct our senses, which after all have been exquisitely designed to grasp and master what is here? And how may we evade the duty to admire what God has entrusted to us, for this surely prepares us completely for all future and eternal admiration! So, when I understood your cheerful and lively words in this sense and with utmost agreement, it increased my joy to such a degree that I thought to recognize you in it quite clearly: Somehow I had long suspected that such a decisive leap would come from you. There it was—and I now feel a kind of pride and satisfaction in having guessed and anticipated quite correctly from your earlier letters what you are capable of. You have been able to establish yourself anew in a place that had become familiar during many years of your childhood and youth. That you feel blessed again in that place to tackle new tasks and desired projects, and that the warmth of accomplishing something each day lets you experience a new degree of feeling alive: This is so much that there is nothing left for your friend to wish for besides hoping that everything may remain exactly like this. Your youth, your untainted will, and the heartfelt and natural direction of the path you’ve so courageously chosen all vouch for the likelihood that this will be the case. The fact that you could make the effort to engage fully in the activities of people your age who share your aspirations is a sign of the most noble and admirable courage, and you are experiencing already how these efforts are paying off on the inside.—What you told me gave me an idea of the affection of your small and harmonious yet vibrant circle, and I would like for you to return their expression of sympathy. I would be delighted to contribute an hour to your gatherings by giving a bit of myself and receiving from all of you in turn, and to share in your joy and happiness!
The Dark Interval Page 3