This is the 150th anniversary of Rilke’s birth.

Or, you might say, the 99th anniversary of his death.

I asked a small group of students if they knew of Rilke, the poet, if they had read Rilke. They did not. Had not. They were seventeen, eighteen years old. One immediately addressed his phone. Assessed that the subject was considered “eccentric” and “mystical,” had failed at military school and been kicked out of trade school, travelled a lot, lived in castles, and did nothing but write poems. Most impressive it seemed was how long ago the poet had died, for the student exclaimed with some astonishment that “he was dead before anything had even happened.”

This is no way to begin, I suppose, it is so unnerving, but it does seem to speak, scream, even, of the exclusivity of the present to the young, its dominance over the past, even the future for which it harbors annihilation.

If Rilke returned as an angel, a Rilkean angel, of course, he would be unperturbed by the student’s remark. He perceived angels in a somewhat Islamic fashion, though he was also impressed by El Greco’s Byzantine figurations. The angels of Christianity were definitely not the beings who inspired him. Rilke’s angels were indifferent, perfect, possessed of sovereign remoteness, and, like all angels, male. (At the same time, he explained carefully, they are creatures “in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we accomplish, appears already consummated.”) They neither comfort nor guide. It is easier to accept Death’s cold clasp than to be embraced by an angel. Angels are the pure timelessness of time. Event means nothing to them. Nor to Rilke.

The student need not pity Rilke for missing out on our savage, lonely, incomprehensible, transitory times.

*

Kafka and Rilke were both born in Prague, eight years apart. I find this remarkable. René was the elder. Later he changed his name to Rainer on the advice of a muse and lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who convinced him that it was more masculine, forceful, and German. Imagine him as a child, gazing sensitively, or perhaps with the alarm he experienced when he encountered dolls and mirrors, into Kafka’s baby carriage. Imagine Rilke practicing “in-seeing” as he observed the intense little newborn creature that was Kafka, unfledged dark eyes smoldering even then. The “in-seeing” that he would describe to a later lady lover in a letter as the “ecstatic” practice of seeing into the heart of things—for example, a dog:

How glorious…to ease oneself into the dog exactly at his center, the place out of which he exists as a dog, that place in him where God would, so to speak, have sat down for a moment when the dog was complete, in order to watch him at his first predicaments and notions and let him know with a nod that he was good.

Of course one could also imagine that protective instinct alone would prevent Rilke from desiring in-seeing into the likes of Kafka. In the same letter to Benvenuta (Magda von Hattingberg, a young Viennese concert pianist) he admitted to the perils of too unmonitored Einsehen:

for a while one can endure being in the middle of the dog but one has to be sure to jump out in time before the wor1d closes in around completely, otherwise one would remain the dog within the dog forever and be lost to everything else.

Picture the dreamy Rilke, a homunculus trapped within the dreaming K! But risk was avoided, the baby-in-the-carriage opportunity never arose. The two never met, though Rilke once wrote to Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s publisher, that he would like a copy of the younger man’s works. “I might assure you, I’m not his worst reader,” he said, peculiarly. When death arrived for Kafka, unerringly punctual as always and less than two years from Rilke’s own, the poet made no comment.

*

The American writer and philosopher William Gass compared Rilke’s childhood to a bird in a ballroom: the bewilderment of having “all that space and none meant for flying, a wide shining floor and nowhere to light.” His mother bore him at twenty-four. A previous child, a girl, had been born the year before and survived only one week. In her grief, the young mother treated him like a girl, dressing him accordingly and calling him Sophie. She also, in his fiercest recollections, treated him like a doll, which led to his lifelong revulsion of those rigid, uncanny, and unresponsive playthings.

Rilke was much displeased by his mother, her somewhat absent-minded abandonment of him to nurses and nannies, her sentimental religiosity, her perceived falsity. Though she survived him by five years, he kills her off in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. (Rilke is not Malte yet Malte is Rilke…) Once young and lovely but now “very much disfigured,” she dies, slowly and hopelessly, the once attentive doctors having lost interest, and that’s it for Maman. As for father, Malte misses the death itself, is abroad, but is present for the bizarre ritual of the perforation of the heart. As per the father’s wishes, doctors pierced the heart with an “instrument” as the body lay on its bier in the uniform of Master of the Hunt. Droplets of blood appeared as though they were “pronouncing a word in two syllables” and dead was dead. This is how this extraordinary moment is described in this book of extraordinary moments:

Scarcely had the broad high breast been laid bare when the hurried little man had picked out the spot in question. But the rapidly applied instrument did not penetrate. I had the feeling that suddenly all time had gone from the room. We were like a group in a picture. But then time caught up again with a slight gliding sound, and there was more of it than could be used up. Suddenly there was a knocking somewhere. I had never heard such knocking before; a warm closed double knocking. My ear transmitted it, and at the same time I saw that the doctor had struck bottom. But it took a little while before the two impressions had coincided within me. So, so, I thought, it is through now. The knocking…was almost malicious.

Malte had to die so Rilke could live, though Rilke could not bring himself to dispatch his shadow within the confines of The Notebooks’ pages. It was an extremely difficult book for him to write. He worked on it for seven years and it ends abruptly out of exhaustion, perhaps, or fear. It was a project attempting to master his inner life and he wandered in a wilderness of fantasies and masks. He hadn’t conjured his angels yet, or their acknowledgement of him. Things did not yet speak to him though he begged their attention. He yearned to slip within them, to become himself in them so they would truly become, through him. He wrote a considerable number of “thing” poems. Some were successful: the panther, the marble torso, the shattering glass… Many were not. He wrote them while he was struggling with Malte. Entering the second section of that work, shortly after the piercing of the heart scene, he scrabbles for purchase. He goes on for pages about the noise a falling tin makes, pages more about his neighbor in a garret, flies, and wanton pictures, before veering into tales of kings, dukes, princesses, the false czars of Russia. It’s a muddle, a flailing. He has attempted to move past the memories of childhood—of fevers and ghosts and the magic of lovely lace. But it is impossible. It is source, all source, beyond which is desert.

Finally, desperate for the end, he seizes upon a retelling of the tale of the Prodigal Son (Dostoevsky’s favorite parable), but in his hands (Rilke’s, Malte’s) it becomes the story of a man who does not want to be loved. Certainly not by family, who have no understanding of who he truly is. As for what he is capable of loving, it is childhood. Only childhood can be revered.

Oh hours of childhood…
when what lay before us
was not the future.

Oddly the particulars of the child, any child, even his own, were subjects of indifference to Rilke. Spending ten days once with his wife, Clara, and their little daughter, Ruth, he found the toddler experience “inhibiting,” the child’s self-absorption “denying” the parents’ life “in continually consuming it.” Family, to Rilke, was similar to visitors who never leave. As for the teller of the tale of the wayward beloved son in the first place, Rilke had felt for some while, possibly forever, that Jesus was an obstacle on the road toward God—much indeed like Malte was on the road toward Rilke.

Back in 1899, after a meaningful trip to Russia where he first encountered Tolstoy’s monumental indifference to him, he wrote the pious sentimental Stories of God, the earnest attempts of a very young man, and finished the frothy forgettable stage play The White Princess. In the same year he would compose sixty-seven poems in twenty-five days, poems that became the first section of Book of Hours, “The Book of a Monastic Life.” Book of Hours is the beginning of Rilke’s greatness. He sees his duty, which is to serve the invisible. And he has left the summer of his youth behind. He was twenty-four.

Summer was like your house, you knew
Where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
As onto a vast plain. Now
The immense loneliness begins….
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
Ripened until it is real,
So that He who began it all
Can feel you when He reaches for you.

His God was real, had always been real. He pictures Him as darkness, a hundred roots silently drinking. At the same time he dismisses images as mere fabrications of the mind. The Poet cannot descry God in such a manner. He has become an unremarkable familiar:

We become so accustomed to you
We no longer look up
When your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.

Rilke was not a deep or conscientious reader. He picked about like a magpie. Malte admits that when he first took to reading, it became clear at once that he didn’t know how to do it. As for Rilke himself he was self-taught and fluent in many languages, though he disliked English and pretended he didn’t understand it. He once had a 170-volume encyclopedia delivered to one of his residences. He professed admiration for Kierkegaard, Kleist, Valéry, the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, and the poet and novelist Franz Werfel. (Who knows what he really made of the Kafka he requested…) He seemed more influenced by paintings, sculpture, the textile arts.

Moving through the fresh elegant aphoristic lines of his Book of Hours, Rilke was formulating new passage, a consciousness of seeing, an extreme attentiveness. He was also shyly considering, suggesting that God was in need of him as much as the opposite, that they were both in the process of becoming—collaborators in fulfillment, co-creators:

I am the dream you are dreaming
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting.

And:

I would rather sense you
as the earth senses you.
In my ripening
ripens
what you are.

Not to be arrogant, Rilke murmurs modestly, but this is the situation. You need me, God, like the living need the dead.

Rilke was becoming more assured. He was beginning to see, to know—he was sure of it. Still… The work ahead, the work of immense loneliness:

I am too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.

And so much of the work depended on inspiration, great gouts of it, unfurling for days, maybe a few weeks, but followed by long periods of silence, depression, struggle, improbably interwoven with constant travel, house parties, and other social intensities. It was impossible for all the moments to be holy. He had left his youth behind, perhaps, but still depended on childhood and its unguarded truths to comfort and orient him.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
To fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

*

By the time The Notebooks was finished (abandoned, you might say, but in any case done, accomplished) he had already published The Book of Images, The Book of Hours, and New Poems. The poet, whom the writer Wilhelm Lehmann referred to as “a professional melancholic castle-dweller,” was widely read, known, and admired most ambitiously by a large number of wealthy women with lovely properties at their disposal for his art. To Benvenuta, who thought of him as the “voice of God, the immortal soul, Fra Angelico, all that is unearthly, good, high and holy—but not a human being!” he wrote that before her “bright joy” had sought him out he felt like one playing hide-and-seek, but now he was like the child who “cries out ‘not yet, not yet!’ and wants to be hidden even more artfully, so that he may later on savor for himself the utmost shock and ecstasy of being found.”

One woman who had met him without the lengthy languors of an intimate correspondence said that “from his eyes, filled with a gleam not of this world, darted the ray of genius.” The princess Marie Von Thurn and Taxis-Hohenlohe called him Doctor Serafico. He was particularly admired in Venice. One young woman recounted, as his biographer Donald Prater observed, that when he stepped from a gondola his eyes seemed “endowed with magical powers.” Later, at dinner, he said quietly to her: “You must have so much to tell me, and I am sure that one day you will tell me it all.” Another gambit was to ask a new acquaintance if she would mind him just sitting beside her without speaking.

Such pick-up lines proved irresistible to many. His lover Baladine Klossowska, who was instrumental in helping him acquire his last fortunate residence in Muzot, Switzerland, and presented him with the postcard of Orpheus and the animals that he kept above his desk and so inspired the Sonnets to Orpheus, called him her “creator.” In turn, he devotedly called her Merline, his female Merlin, his sorceress.

Rilke’s talent for enrapturing women was surpassed only by his ability to procure the endless flow of money necessary for a peripatetic lifestyle of comfortable access. “He simply could not cope with cold, discomfort, and intrusive new neighbors,” Prater wrote, and, as he expressed in a letter to a patron, “my depression, which is already deep enough, would crush me completely if I were exposed to petty disagreeableness.” It really was extreme, his success in acquiring funds, loans, advances, gifts, stipends, and subsidies. And in ensconcing himself in lovely hotels, castles, villas, chateaus, and hermitages. His demands were considerable. He liked a good view, of course. The Elegies would never have commenced were it not for the voice of the wind off the rugged Italian cliffs of Duino and the Adriatic Sea. He liked gardens, which he could tend and contemplate, “turn into words.” Regarding their care, he said gaily, “it seems, I don’t know why, we need venerable, respectable, uncommonly experienced manure.” He required solitude. Solitude was essential. His lovers were to be “guardians of his solitude,” facilitating it, sacramentalizing it with the purest of fidelities. As for his role in the affairs, the ideal would be that in loving, he would free himself from the loved one:

                            and, quivering, endured;
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the
                            gathering out-leap,
something more than itself.

He avoided the constrictions of love again and again and his lovers remained bewitched, grateful. He wanted solitude but he wanted a supernumerous existence too, in the Rilkean sense. He needed the stimulation of constant travel—for staying is nowhere, he said so himself—the activity of purchasing furnishings for new rooms, things that would fulfill themselves through his attention to them. He needed the constant planning for acquiring new residential opportunities, the maintenance of friendships, the little gifts and dedications, the merci notes and fostering of new relationships. He enjoyed declaiming his work to audiences. When alone, working, he spoke his words aloud. He enjoyed dinner parties, more often than not. If he unfortunately found himself alone in the evening he would drink a single glass of milk. He did not like to be alone for too long. It depressed him. As had his marriage. Marriage appalled him more and more as that unfortunate union moved sluggishly into the past. Clara’s work as a sculptor no longer impressed him. Indeed he felt that there was nothing to Clara at all, “nothing but alternating function of ingesting me and eliminating me again.” On his deathbed he would not allow the hapless woman to say goodbye, irritated by what he felt was “curiosity.”

Lovers, however, moved him. They were paramount in his galaxy of the divine. The only drawback to them was that the beloved other, being so peskily present, was

always spoiling the view!

Rilke was demanding of others—not in the sense that he wished to rally them toward introspection or recognition, but by his insistence that they arise to assist him in this singular quest: to serve the Poet, tend to his needs so that he might more unobstructedly achieve the Open, the freedom of the Open that only the animals know:

And where we see Future it sees Everything
and itself in Everything and healed forever.

And:

the free animal has its demise
perpetually behind it and before it always
God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity,
the way brooks and running springs move.

This is the free animal, it should be said, with whom Rilke had little, perhaps no, experience. His actual acquaintance was with a few childhood dogs, a frightening horse or two, and the famous soul-shattered panther observed in a French zoo’s tiny cage.

These were his interests. Lovers, Animals, God (to the degree that The Omnipotent One was becoming ever more complete under Rilke’s regard), and Death:

a bluish distillate
in a cup without a saucer.

Death intrigued him, particularly his own. His death was special, it belonged to him. It had to be singular after his life’s great efforts. This he believed. Quite the contrast to Hemingway’s remark when asked how his second wife, Pauline, had died: “She died like everyone else…and after that she was dead.”

In Helen Gardner’s marvelous study The Art of T.S. Eliot, she writes that because “poets are born before they are made,” they “must write according to their temperaments.” Eliot’s was “ironic, diffident, at war with his surroundings; skeptical, preferring understatement, hints and suggestions; fastidious, reserved, acutely sensitive to beauty and ugliness, but even more to misery and happiness.” Rilke’s temperament, it could be said, was fragile, ghost-haunted, unironic, unthrifty, reliant, romantic, intermittently animistic, and decidedly non-avant-garde.

He wanted to witness the world not as a human being might but as an angel (his Angel) would. This was his work. A work that made enormous demands on him to transform everything he saw to an inner reality. To make the without the within, the inner emotion the manifestation of what was merely seen. An utter fusion, a divine equivalency. The crabbed limited inner world of the self becomes enjambed, enjoined, with the limitless world. In the first poem of his Spanish Trilogy (he felt the Spanish landscape so intense that it made his job of expression much easier) he calls upon God to make him whole, to make of him, with Him, the Thing, the one Thing:

from all of this to make
a single thing, Lord: from me and those deep soughs
with which the herd, put up in the fold,
waits out the great dark cessation
of the world—, from me and from every candle
in the dimness of the many houses, Lord.

to make the Thing, Lord Lord Lord, the Thing
that, cosmic-terrestrial, like a meteor
collects in its gravity only the sum of flight:
weighing nothing but arrival.

He did not find solace in nature. It was the means (if not merely the means) to triumphantly become one with one’s being in the world, though his fierce employment of the word “thing” is curious, the insistence on such an infelicitous unspecific connotatively dismissive term is disappointing.

Rilke relied on readymades to engage us—the tried and true of rose, fountain, tree, unicorn, the animal that never was. Are they infused with fresh power by his shaping hand? When he speaks in a language of more personal arcanae—acrobats, catkins, crazed cups, Gaspara Stampa—we are less willing to accede to their importance, their promise, or ability to create a spark. The correlative fails. The within remains the stony dark within. The without, a chaos of signs and false portents. It must be said that at times Rilke falls short in the conjuring of the wizard bridge. But he wasn’t building it for us. He was a prophet to himself. Others—creatures, patrons, art, weather, readers, lovers—all things—existed to transform his own consciousness. When he does speak to us his attention feels somehow inadvertent, an excess of personal discovery that creates an overflow just deep enough for us to lap at.

*

With the despair of writing Malte behind him, he could despair about not knowing what to write about. At times he felt he had said everything he could possibly say. Other times he felt that now work could truly begin, that all songs were possible. But season followed season and inspiration did not come, nothing of import was written. He did reviews, translations, discovered Shakespeare, considered psychoanalysis. His travels picked up to a dizzying degree. He went to Provence, Berlin, Capri, Vienna, Munich, back to Prague, Paris again and again. He even went on an extended trip to North Africa—Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile—with a new friend, the wealthy unhappily married Jenny Oltersdorf (a trip from which he returned, curiously, without comment).

And then came the invitation from the Princess Marie, inviting him to her castle in Italy. When the Princess first met him she found him “very ugly yet very sympathique, extremely shy, but with excellent manners.” She knew he was always in search of a quiet place to work and the castle would be available all winter. Family and friends would be leaving after the final autumn party and there would be just a caretaker and cook at his service. And it came to pass that inspiration would find him there in that austere and lonely spot. It would howl the first line of the great elegies in his ear. During the evening of January 20, 1912, he would complete the first long poem. In the days following he would write the second elegy.

But January was cold, February even colder. He was lonely, he longed for the warmth of Venice, perhaps a new lover. The search resumed for appropriate lodging and steady financial support, increasing financial support. Fresh contacts must be made with patrician society, with cosmopolitan society. The need for solitude was paramount but the ground for it must be laid, the endless correspondence completed, the new standing desk and writing table acquired. He went to Toledo, Cordoba, Seville. He spent a considerable amount of time in Ronda, a bullfighting center. World War I loomed, then it arrived. His home countries, Austria and Germany, were at war with his soul countries, Russia and France. He rather wished he could transform the war “into an adventure purely of the mind,” in his friend Harry Kessler’s words, but he could not. It seemed unassimilable. He drifted about, wrote some embarrassing phallic poems, and collected two new muses, Loulou Lazard and “Baby” Friedlander. He also wrote a few scattered lines of the Elegies and, on the eve of his induction into the Austrian Army, the whole of the astonishing fourth.

Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it
within its constellation, with the measure
of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death
from gray bread, that grows hard,—or leave it there,
within the round mouth, like the choking core
of a sweet apple?……Minds of murderers
are easily divined. But this, though: death,
the whole of death,—even before life’s begun,
to hold it all so gently, and be good:
this is beyond description!

Conscription was a calamity for Rilke. Prater noted that he was “unsuited both mentally and physically for the exertions demanded,” if not “annihilated by them.” After several apparently ghastly weeks he was transferred to desk duty in the War Archives Department and shortly after that, thanks to the considerable efforts of his many friends and supporters in high places, was relieved of military duty altogether.

It would be almost seven years before he wrote anything of note. He was the most cursed of artists—the poet excelling only at being a Poet. What should have been his years, new work exceeding the early heights of achievement, were passing, had passed by. “I’m not living my own life,” he would say in despair, as well as considerable wonder. The war had been catastrophic for him.

He could no longer find renewal in travel. Even tending to the voluminous correspondence that had always focused his thoughts and sculpted his feelings brought him no satisfaction. He felt only repetition, a hopeless sterility. In 1920 he wrote a short preface to a book of drawings about a lost cat, Mitsou, created by his latest lover Merline’s precocious son, a child named Baltusz, who would later become the painter Balthus. Rilke begins by saying that he always felt that a cat’s existence was never anything but shakily hypothetical, positing that no one has ever lost a cat, to lose a cat is unheard of. For a cat, because it so totally inhabits its own utterly separate presence, is not ours to lose. Even so, the grief of perceived loss can compel the lover, the artist, the child, to see more clearly by interiorizing the memory of the loved one. The introduction to Mitsou ends:

Don’t worry: I am. Baltusz exists. Our world is whole.
There are no cats.

It’s a peculiar and not altogether convincing effort—the interiorization of loss so it becomes a different, purer kind of acquisition—but it’s essence of Rilke, who at this point could scarcely write a line without its embodying his need to illuminate the mysterious inner world by spiritually possessing the outer.

But real work remained elusive. The words did not arrive, could not be conjured, particularly the words of love. More and more seemed inexpressible. His priorities had shifted, mundanely, unheroically—paramount now was long-term stability, only that would allow him the freedom he so required. “I must give absolute priority,” he insisted, rather prosaically, “to making certain that my life as a whole through the coming years finds a form that is favorable for me.” He began to suspect that fate harbored a “secret hostility” toward his work. He also felt that his passion for the “sorceress” Merline was draining his creative powers. (“You recently wrote that I am not one who can be consoled by love,” he writes to her. “You were right. After all, what could be more useless to me than a life that allows itself to be consoled?”) He feared that he was on the verge of abandoning the Elegies.

It was then that salvation arrived in the sturdy guise of a Swiss philanthropist, whose support the “sorceress” Merline managed to secure. Werner Reinhart, who particularly favored musicians and poets, was the ideal patron for Rilke. He simply purchased an acceptable dwelling—in this instance a square thirteenth-century tower set in a small garden in the Swiss town of Muzot—repaired and refurbished it, and allowed Rilke to inhabit it for as long as he wished. No passion or endless flirtatious dalliance need be involved. It was a generous arrangement. But Rilke had always felt the scenery of Switzerland rather “contrived,” and living at Muzot at first made him feel he was residing within a rusty suit of armor, nonetheless he became fond of the “old walls” and determined to stay.

In the spring of 1921 he had, almost secretly, written the anguished Testament, a forty-odd-page curiosity about love, the spear, love, equanimity, balance, failure, love, and the wish to become one of the two small apples on the windowsill of a Jan van Eyck painting, The Madonna of Lucca, most specifically the shadow of one of those apples. There is also the mention of the unpleasant reality of a sawmill, the Berg sawmill close by, and its unrelenting noisome business of grim substantive change. (By sheer determined alchemy this would later be transformed by Rilke into the famous “tree in the ear” of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

Most unsettlingly, The Testament includes two pages of words that Rilke transcribed from a mostly empty “sinister” notebook that he then burned:

ambush down envy glutton prosperity vice…
wasp heart cinema (child) mourning dewy… 
baptismal font wrath turbidity multicolor applause…
feed-rack drink novice nod oh axis…
grip slaver claw exercise night-train zeal
desert spear frenzy break-in rage run…
casein affliction crown bishopric berry…
cold sweat choker frost vicuña

*

If all Angels are terrifying, as Rilke famously maintained, this one visiting him that April was truly monstrous. Yet the Poet kept the list, the words. They were the product, he determined, of his once capable mind disintegrating when “a strange weight like corrosive acid poured over it.”

The reasons for writing The Testament seem obscure. Perhaps Rilke put it together as he did The Notebooks—to get something out of the way—in this case the terror of not being able to complete himself in writing. He always feared that he would wither before harvest, remain unripened, a bud rotting before unfurling into flower. Here he seemed intent on placing himself ahead of loss as though it were behind him—testament as talisman, testament as hex against hopelessness. And it could be considered successful, carrying him through the summer and uneventful fall into the winter and new year of 1922 when on February 11, at precisely six o’clock in the evening it is said, the completion of the long-awaited Duino Elegies arrived.

He wrote immediately to the Princess Marie, mistress of the fabled Italian chateau—“There was a nameless storm, a hurricane in my mind (like that time in Duino), everything in the way of fiber and web in me split,—eating was not to be thought of, God knows who fed me.
But now it is. IS,
Amen.”

In the following few weeks he composed all of the Sonnets.

He had become the Artist, the Poet who had renounced both gain and loss through an absolute and unwavering ascent. He had fused Lament and Praise, pronounced Death as fellow traveler: “Life’s word is always Yes and No at the same time. But death…is the final Yes, says only Yes…” He had affirmed the world, become Orpheus. Become song.

Our lives
pass in transformation. And all the while the outside realm
diminishes.

1922. The year after Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The year of The Wasteland and Ulysses.

*

Wittgenstein once gave Rilke money. He wanted to support a poet or two and he heard Rilke was good. It was a considerable amount of money, but most of it was misplaced during the early days of World War I. Wittgenstein went off to fight. Rilke, as we know, was horrified at the thought of being a soldier. He simply could not be one. Those were strange times. As are these.

Wittgenstein said, “The world is the totality of facts, not things.” Rilke said, “The world only exists within.” They seemed to be considerably at odds in their thinking but Rilke was deft at accepting support, even from anonymous sources. It’s hard to imagine him today scraping up money from so many still various individuals. To imagine the wives or daughters of American trillionaires, say, taking him up as a hobby, supporting the arts in that way, angling for a dedication in the frontispiece of a perfect book of poesy. Or that they would offer him their penthouses and watchtowers, their mansions and camps, their ranches and stocked bunkers…

Impossible.

Easier to imagine the Rilke of his time gazing into that baby carriage, the one that held his fabulous opposite, his polar pilgrim—Kafka—and still becoming the timeless writer he became.