I want to thank you for adding to the trust you’ve placed in me, for your new contributions…and not least of all for how you let me feel that what I had tried to tell you recently indeed found you receptive. Alas, I know that these consolations amount to so little, for they are quickly used up and the heartache incessantly replenishes on its own.
But your new letter proves to me that you are able to lift your gaze up and above it, toward many important and lasting matters. And this means that you are not in danger of becoming trapped in an impoverishing daily bitterness. For people who are permanently caught in sorrow in this way there is only one liberation: to lift suffering itself up into one’s own gaze and from there let it assist one’s vision. I suspect that for some time now you have had this realization on your own, and that a few times already you have had the experience of perceiving more richly and deeply things which happen or are shown to you, precisely on the basis of your sorrow.
I am quite happy that I am now in the position (while my letter has to remain all too brief) to speak with you differently and with more validity: by means of the enclosed book, along with which a few petals of your beautiful roses are also returning to you.
Please accept my warmest regards, also for Christmas!
R. M. Rilke
And definitely: When I visit Bern at some point we should arrange to meet there or in Burgdorf. I am looking forward to it.
TO RUDOLF F. BURCKHARDT
Burckhardt (1877–1964) was a Swiss art historian and the conservator of the Basel Historical Museum from 1908 to 1926. His correspondence with Rilke began after their first encounter in 1919. The “three pale brothers” in the letter may refer to a fourteenth-century jewel identified by Burkhardt. Sonnet XXI in Sonnets to Orpheus also refers to the medieval tapestry of a garden of love mentioned in the letter.
APRIL 14, 1924
Muzot s/Sierre (Valais)
My dear Rudolf F. Burckhardt,
When I address you in this effort of innermost concentration, I become aware that nothing has been forgotten of the many good things that you were able to arrange for me since our first encounter (at a festive occasion where the “three pale brothers” played a role). I continue to remember those hours in Venice and our correspondence about the tapestry of the garden of love, and I think of all of those moments as more than only the circumstances of verifiable memory. All of us who have learned patience and sensitivity from things which have survived and long been admired probably share this sense that destiny’s vagaries pass to us in more ways than only via what is real or visible. How should we not, when it truly matters, understand such experiences as both a kind of assistance and the unspoken sense that we who experience this are placed within a greater Whole from which we cannot be removed? Yes: The more someone has been able to recognize here, the more separations and farewells he will have had to accomplish through the course of his life. But I often feel as if these separations and departures would all be affirmations again in an open world, and that they would be called something else there.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
TO CATHERINE POZZI
Catherine Pozzi (1882–1934) was a French poet and essayist. Her correspondence (in French) with Rilke took place during 1924–1925 after a first meeting arranged by the poet Paul Valéry (1871–1945). Her poetry was published posthumously. Henri de Régnier, who is mentioned in the letter, was a French symbolist poet (1864–1936) and married to Marie de Régnier, a poet and novelist who used the pen name Gérard d’Houville.
AUGUST 21, 1924
Château de Muzot
s/Sierre (Valais) Switzerland
Dear esteemed friend:
You were truly in danger—I could imagine that was what made me stop in Bern to write to you. But the whole time I was writing this letter I did not feel at all like telling you anything, and instead there was a sudden urge to quickly rush to you and be close to you: It was like a suppressed trip. But what a stupid accident that has cast you among the worst dangers. It is a series of bad coincidences (a mosquito bite, food poisoning by a moldy casserole, etc.) that most compromises the order which I would like to discover. It seems to me like the strange occurrence of a nasty disease which, to excite the nosy neighbors, attacks anyone at all, at any time, to find out what will happen next! And that surgeon: In spite of your weakness, are you strong enough not to hate him? I can say without feeling embarrassed: I hate him!
I was quite envious of Henri de Régnier, who was able to visit you, not that I was feeling capable of offering any sort of “consolation” that would have matched his, but because I so much wish to speak with you in person. My pen has grown a bit cold and exhausted from using it apart from my actual work. It seems to me that this dual use, which is already so damaging to writing, makes it sometimes entirely uncertain. Because what one expresses immediately, just in order to communicate something, is so very different from the lasting expression of art that needs to be captured and accepted with full consciousness in order to make itself be understood much later. And the pen, between those two tasks, vacillates and hesitates. So many times I envied Rodin his docile and relaxed earthen clay, which cannot be used to say hello or to order a meal!
Finally, what I am displaying is perhaps nothing but the symptom of a great fatigue that seems to weigh me down after an extremely long period of uninterrupted solitude. If you were to ask me, I believe I would agree that I am rather unhappy at the moment but nonetheless find myself at the bottom of definitive happiness. I am going through a bad moment (which drags on), but what good is it to talk about it; it isn’t during that moment, in any case, that I am writing to you.
I imagine your life (and you always give me the most convincing proof), in spite of all the bad, to have been good and victorious. Already in your childhood and early youth, you seem to have been surrounded by wisdom and understanding. The elders in your life had decided (and were able) to lead you toward life and to prepare you to relate to it with dignity, and you have had—in body and soul—the most fortunate gift of being able to accept their generous suggestions. How different that was for us (with some rare exceptions) in Austria, where everyone seemed to take pleasure in pointing out obstacles. Ultimately it was almost a constructive idea, in that contradictory country, to seek out the impossibilities and rejoice in them. The young generation just managed on its own under this unhealthy regime of obstinate and disillusioned bureaucrats.
The contradictions that are found in my writings: Do they have their roots in that past which I have not been able to correct even through my most clear-eyed efforts? Probably, for in life I also often feel quite advanced in certain areas while in others I remain less knowledgeable than the simplest person. In life, such contrasts are difficult to reconcile and can at any moment become disastrous. In art, if you have the time to persevere and create an entire, uninterrupted work, such oppositions, even those of ideas, are necessary and can finally constitute a kind of alternating rhythm. I believe, moreover, that these more or less provisional contradictions which you have noticed in my verses are not so much there where you place them right now. I believe, for example, that it would be not too difficult for us to agree about the two poems (Sonnets XII and XIII) which propose to consent absolutely to the changes and transformations of our conditions. The most profound experiences of my life all converge to make me acknowledge death as another part of that trajectory whose vertiginous curve we follow without being able to come to a halt even for a moment. I feel more and more drawn, from my provisional position, to agree with that Whole where life and death penetrate each other and incessantly mix. The Angel of my affirmations (der Engel des Jasagens [The Angel of Saying Yes]), turns a radiant face toward death. Although life needs so much else, it is death above all, death itself, weighed down by so many bad suspicions, that I would like to rehabilitate by putting it back in that central spot it has n
ever left but from which we have averted our eyes. I feel compelled to demonstrate that it is one of the great treasures of that formidable Whole of which life is perhaps only the smallest part, even though life is already so rich on its own that it surpasses all of our means and all of our measures. Such complete agreement with change must be grounded in events filled with constancy and permanence—and indeed I too can affirm that I feel “so much the same in spirit and body.” If I infinitely agree with the necessary transformations and all of the farewells which a greater rhythm imposes on us, that is because for me the fog of all these changes begins to turn transparent, thanks to our flame which passes through them without ever being extinguished. But I stop here. I venture nothing but conjectures, and I will not claim to explain my poems. I would like to believe, instead, that they think for me and will succeed in enlightening me!
I am preparing for my return: again to Grisons, Ragaz, and the surrounding areas, unless there is an unforeseen change in my projects. After that it will be (perhaps): Paris! I share this with you in secret because such a beautiful project should stay locked up so that it is truly new at the moment of its happy realization. It is an indescribable joy for me to think that one day it will be permitted for me to visit you as if it were completely natural and not at all a chapter of a miracle. Perhaps one day I could meet there again Madame Gérard d’Houville. I have known for a long time how wonderful she is. (Once, many years ago, I noticed from my window in the Palazzo Valmarana in Venice, how she crossed the small Campo de San Vio alongside M. de Régnier.) It seems to me that you promise me the continuation of so many lines which happy circumstances had begun to trace earlier. Thank you!
Rilke
P.S. Before I return I will send you my copy of the Elegies (the book which finally infinitely consents) to exchange it later for your definitive copy of the current edition.
TO WITOLD HULEWICZ
The poet, literary critic, and publisher Witold Hulewicz (1895–1941) translated Rilke’s writings into Polish. The two writers’ first meeting, in Switzerland in the early 1920s, was followed by a friendship and long correspondence. Rilke’s Book of Hours appeared in 1905, The New Poems in 1907 and 1908, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge in 1910, and The Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies in 1923.
[SIERRE, NOVEMBER 13, 1925]
And is it I who may offer the correct explanation for the Elegies? They reach out infinitely beyond me. I regard them to be a further elaboration of those essential premises that were already given in the Book of Hours, that tentatively played with the world-image in both parts of the New Poems, and that then in Malte, contracted in conflict, strike back into life and there almost become proof that this life, so suspended above an abyss, is impossible. In the Elegies, based on the same conditions, life becomes possible again. Indeed, here it receives that ultimate affirmation to which young Malte, though on the correct and difficult path of his “longues études” [extensive studies], could not yet lead it. The affirmation of life-and-death appears as one in the Elegies. To admit one without the other would be, as the Elegies let us experience and celebrate, a limitation which in the end shuts out all that is infinite. Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and upon which we do not cast our light: We must try to achieve the greatest awareness of our existence that is at home in both unbounded realms and is inexhaustibly nourished by them. The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the greatest circulation courses through both: There is neither a here and now nor a beyond but the great unity where the beings which surpass us, the angels, are at home. And now to the matter of the problem of love, in this world expanded by its greater half, in this world only now complete and only now healed. I am surprised that the Sonnets to Orpheus, which are at least as “difficult” and filled with the same essence, are not more helpful for you in understanding the Elegies. These latter poems were begun in 1912 (at Duino), continued in Spain and Paris (in fragments) until 1914; the war interrupted this, my greatest work, altogether; when I dared in 1922 to take them up again (here), the new Elegies and their conclusion were preceded by a few days by the Sonnets to Orpheus, which imposed themselves tempestuously (and which had not been in my plan). They are, as it cannot be otherwise, of the same “birth” as the Elegies and the fact that they appeared suddenly, without a conscious effort of my will, in connection with a girl who had died young, brings them even closer to the source of their origin. The connection is yet another relation to the center of that realm whose depth and influence we, everywhere unbounded, share with the dead and those yet to come. We, who live here and now, are not for a moment satisfied in the time-world nor confined in it; we incessantly flow over and over to those who preceded us, to our origin, and to those who seemingly come after us. In that greatest “open” world all are, not really “simultaneously,” since the dropping away of time results in a state where they all are. Transience everywhere plunges into a deep being. Thus all of the configurations of the here and now are to be used not only in a time-bound way but, as far as we can accomplish that, to be integrated into those superior meanings of which we are a part. But not in the Christian sense (from which I am moving away ever more passionately), but in a purely earthy, blissfully earthy consciousness, we must introduce what we see and touch here into the wider and widest orbit. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole. Nature, the things of our daily interactions and use, are provisional and perishable. But as long as we are here, they are our property and our friendship, co-conspirators in our distress and joy just as they have already been the familiars of our forebears. So it is important not only not to disparage and degrade everything that exists in the here and now—rather, especially because of their provisional character, which they share with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us with our innermost sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so painfully and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again “invisibly.” We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible. [We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.] The Elegies show us, by way of this effort of the continual transformations of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibration and excitation of our own nature, that new frequencies of vibration are introduced into the vibrating spheres of the universe. (Since the different elements in the cosmos are only different exponents of vibration, we prepare, in this way, not only intensities of a mental kind but, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae, and constellations.) And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the ever more rapid vanishing of so many visible things that will no longer be replaced. Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, and even their coat were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate, and almost any object was for them a vessel in which they encountered the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, make-believe things, mock-ups of life…A house, in the American sense, an American apple, or a grapevine over there has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which had entered the hopes and thoughtfulness of our forefathers…The things that are animated and share in our knowledge because they were truly experienced, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last ones who will still have known such things. On us rests the responsibility not only of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and lares-like worth. (“Lares” in the sense of the guardian deities of the home.) The earth has no other way out than to become invisible: only in us who with a part of our nature partake of the invisible and who have (at least) some stock in it, and who can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here. In us alone can this inti
mate and lasting transformation be consummated that turns the visible into something invisible which no longer depends on seeing or touching it, just as our own destiny grows at once more present and invisible in us. The Elegies posit this norm for our existence: They affirm and celebrate this consciousness. They cautiously integrate it into its traditions by referring back to ancient transmissions and the rumors of such transmissions to justify this supposition and even invoke a preknowledge of such relations in the Egyptian cult of the dead. (Although the “Land of Lamentation” through which the older “lamentation” leads the young dead [in Duino Elegies] is not to be identified with Egypt but is only, in a sense, a mirroring of the Nile region in the desert clarity of the consciousness of the dead.) When one makes the mistake of applying Catholic concepts of death, of the beyond and of eternity to the Elegies or Sonnets, one gets entirely away from their point of departure and prepares for an ever more basic misunderstanding. The “angel” of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven (it is closer to the angel figures of Islam). The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we accomplish, appears already consummated. For the angel of the Elegies, all past towers and palaces exist because they have been long invisible, and the still standing towers and bridges of our existence are already invisible although (for us) they still persist physically. The angel of the Elegies is that being which vouches for the recognition of the invisible at a higher order of reality.—That is why he is “terrible” for us since we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible after all.—All the worlds of the universe plunge into the invisible as their next-deeper reality; a few stars intensify immediately and expire in the infinite consciousness of the angels. Others depend on beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, and in whose terrors and ecstasies they reach their next invisible realization. We are, let it be emphasized once more, in the sense of the Elegies, we are the transformers of the earth. Our entire existence, the flights and sudden plunges of our love, everything qualifies us for this task (beside which there exists, essentially, no other). (The Sonnets show some details of this activity which here appears under the name and protection of a dead girl whose incompletion and innocence holds open the entrance to the grave so that she, having gone from us, belongs to those powers that keep one half of life fresh and turned toward the other, opened up like a wound.) The Elegies and Sonnets support each other constantly, and I consider it an infinite grace that I was permitted to fill both sails with the same breath: the small, rust-colored sail of the Sonnets and the gigantic white canvas of the Elegies.
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