"Everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I know I often complain about being busy, but lately-- with AP tests, scholarship essays-- I'm now so busy that I have no sleep or rest for a moment, no time to even read-- though I can't quite say that. I do read, in fragments and snatches; when I do, I read Rilke.
Rilke is one of the greatest German-language poets, and inivetably the one I turn to in times of crisis.
I recently had to buy a new book of his collected poems, as the binding of my old copy had split so many times that several pages had fallen out, lost forever. I re-ead the Duino Elegies, though I know a few by heart. I re-read "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," and wonderingly wondered if it's possibly the most perfect poem ever written. I read literary theory, reveled in written conversation of Rike's life and work, the peculiar turns of genius. And, of all the fascinating minutae in his life, it's a certain aspect of his relationship with Rodin that has left the largest impression on me, especially now-- his adoration of hard work, of doing that which seems unbearable.
What Rilke admired in Rodin, more than anything else, was his work ethic-- he made things with his hands, descended with apparent effortlessness into "great, inner solitude" and contructed what he saw there. Already fascinated by the themes he encountered on his trip to Russia-- emptiness, Nietsche's hyperborean wastes-- Rilke began to delve into the depths of the literary vision he would perfect in the Duino Elegies-- "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure/ and we are awed so because it serenely disdains to annhiliate us. Every angel is terrible."
Rilke, with his repetitive imagery-- terrible angels, roses, "cosmic space"-- is less monotonous than hypnotic, mesmerizing-- a soft, even voice murmuring, murmuring, almost too low to hear. Solitude and infinity and the horrible burden of one's individual soul-- there is some essential truth to be found, he tells us, but it will never be realized because it exists outside of the self, apart from it. The panther paces its cage, explosion of an almost-Joycean epiphany-- "an image enters in/ rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles/ plunges into the heart and is gone." At the center is nothing, a great, positive abscense, a perfect void. Tensed, it watches and waits.
A cold comfort, yes. The purpose of life, Rilke wrote, is to be defeated by greater and greater things-- defeated? I suppose I'll wait and see.
Rustle of pages, I wake up at night with the book on my night table, a bible. God-making. "For here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life."
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