The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  I think he took it; it was not my fault that I had no more to give.

  The Place Saint-Michel was busy with large numbers of vehicles and people hurrying to and fro, and often we would be caught between two carriages; then he would take a breath and relax, as if he were resting, and there would be a little hopping and nodding of the head. Maybe that was the stratagem by which his cornered malady meant to get the better of him. His will had been breached in two places, and in submitting his obsessed muscles had been left with a mild, goading animation and that compulsive two-beat rhythm. But the stick was still in its place, and the hands looked grim and wrathful; in this way, we walked out on to the bridge, and all was well. It went well. Now, an element of uncertainty affected his walk, and he would take two paces, then he stood still again. Stood. His left hand gently released its grip on the stick and rose, so slowly that I saw it tremble against the air; he pushed his hat back a little and wiped his brow. He turned his head slightly, and his gaze swept unsteadily across the sky, the houses and the water, without taking any of it in, and then he gave in. The stick was gone, he flung wide his arms as if he meant to fly, and something like a force of Nature broke forth from him and doubled him up and tore him back and set him to nodding and bowing and slung some dancing power out of him and into the crowd. For by now a large number of people had gathered around him, and I saw him no more.

  What sense would there have been in going anywhere after that? I was drained. Like a blank piece of paper I drifted along, past the houses, back up the boulevard.

  [22] *I am trying to write to you, although really there is nothing to say after a necessary parting. I am trying nonetheless; I think I must, because I saw the saint in the Panthéon,14 the solitary, saintly woman and the roof and the door and the lamp inside with its modest circle of light, and, beyond, the sleeping city and the river and the moonlit distance. The saint watches over the sleeping city. I wept. I wept, because there it all was, all at once and so unexpectedly. I wept before her; I could not help it.

  I am in Paris; those who hear this are pleased, and most of them envy me. They are right to do so. It is a great city, great, full of curious temptations. For myself, I must admit that in a sense I have yielded to them. I do not think there is any other way of putting it. I have yielded to these temptations, and this has resulted in various changes, if not in my character, then in my outlook on the world, and at all events in my life. Under these influences, I have formed an altogether different conception of everything under the sun; certain differences now mark me off from other people more than anything ever did in the past. A world transformed. A new life full of new meanings. At the moment I am finding it a little difficult, because it is all too new. I am a beginner in the circumstances of my own life.

  Might it not be possible, just for once, to see the sea?

  Yes, but just think, I was imagining you would be able to come. Could you perhaps have told me if there was a doctor? I forgot to enquire. But in any case I no longer need the information.

  Do you remember Baudelaire's incredible poem ‘Une Charogne’? It may be that I understand it now. Apart from the last stanza, he was quite right. What was he to do after such an experience? It was his task to see, in these matters that were terrible but only seemingly repellent, the abiding essence of being that lies below all that is. There is no choice, and no refusing. Do you suppose it was chance that Flaubert wrote ‘Saint Julien l'Hospitalier’? That, it seems to me, is the crux: whether a man can bring himself to lie down beside a leper and warm him with the heart's warmth, the warmth of nights spent in love – only good could come of such an action.15

  Do not suppose that I am smarting under disappointments. Quite the contrary. At times I am bemused to find how readily I relinquish all my expectations for the sake of reality, even when it is harsh.

  My God, if only some of this could be shared. But would it then be, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

  [23] The existence of the terrible in every particle of the air. You breathe it in as part of something transparent; but within you it precipitates, hardens, acquires angular, geometrical forms in among your organs; for all the torments and horrors suffered at places of execution, in torture chambers, in madhouses, in operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn – all this is possessed of a tenacious permanence, all of it persists and, jealous of all that is, clings to its own frightful reality. People would prefer to be able to forget much of it; sleep files away gently at the grooves in the brain, but dreams drive it away and trace the lines anew. And they wake, panting, and dissolve the gleam of a candle in the dark, and drink in the half-lit solace as if it were sugared water. Ah, but how precariously that security is poised. The slightest movement, and again the gaze races beyond what is familiar and friendly, and the outline that was so comforting a moment ago becomes clearly recognizable as the brink of horror. Beware of the light, for it hollows out space; don't look round to see whether, as you sat up, a shadow has arisen, as your master. It might have been better if you had stayed in the dark, and your heart, unconstrained, had tried to be the heavy heart of all that cannot be distinguished. Now you have gathered yourself up; you see your own end before you, in your own hands; every now and then, with an imprecise movement, you trace the contours of your face. And within you there is scarcely any room; and it almost calms you, to think that it is impossible for anything of any great size to abide in those cramped confines, that even something quite monstrous must needs become an inner thing and accept the limits imposed by circumstance. But outside, outside there is no end to it; and when it rises out there, it fills up inside you as well – not in the vessels, which are partly in your own control, or in the phlegm of your more impassive organs, but in the capillaries, sucked as if up a tube into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified being. There it arises, there it passes over you, rising higher than your breath, to which you have fled as if to your final resting place. Ah, but where will you go from there, where? Your heart is driving you out of yourself, your heart is after you, and you are almost beside yourself and you can't go back. Like a beetle stepped on, you ooze out of yourself, and your little scrap of carapace and adaptability is meaningless.

  O night without objects, O insensible window on the world, O doors kept carefully shut, O the olden ways of living, adopted, approved, but never fully understood. O the silence on the staircase, the silence in the next room, the silence high up under the ceiling. O Mother: O you, the only one who dealt with all that silence, back in my childhood; who took it upon herself, saying: Do not be afraid – it's me; who had the courage, in the dead of night, to be that silence for one who was frightened, who was scared stiff. You light a lamp, and that sound is already you. And you hold out the lamp before you, and say: It's me – don't be frightened. And you put it down, slowly, and there's no doubt about it: it is you, you are the light that enfolds these familiar, intimate things that are there without any hidden agenda, good, simple, unambiguous. And if anything should stir behind the wall, or a step be heard on the floorboards, you merely smile; you smile, you give a transparent smile on a bright ground to that fearful face looking searchingly at you, as if you were one, and in on the secret, with every half-formed sound, and everything were agreed and understood between you. Is there any power to equal your power among all the lords of the earth? See, kings lie with a fixed stare, and no teller of tales can distract them. Though they lie at the blessed breast of their loved one, horror steals upon them and leaves them shaking and listless. But you, when you come, keep all that is monstrous behind you, and are altogether in front of it, not like some curtain that it might pull aside here or there, no, but as if you had passed it by in answering the call of one who needed you. As if you had anticipated, by a long way, anything that might happen, and the only thing at your back was your own haste, the path you eternally take, the flight of your love.

  [24] The mouleur16 whose shop I pass every day has hung two masks b
eside his door. The face of the young woman who drowned, which they took a cast of in the morgue because it was beautiful, because it was smiling, smiling so deceptively, as if it knew. And under it, his face, which did know. That firm knot of tightly drawn senses. That relentless self-compression of music forever wanting to steam right out. The countenance of one whose hearing a god had sealed up, that there might be no sounds but his own; that he might not be led astray by what is muddied and ephemeral in noises – he, in whom their clarity and permanence resided; that only the soundless senses might bear in the world to him, silently, a tensed and waiting world, unfinished, before the creation of sound.

  Consummator of the world: just as that which falls as rain upon the earth and the waters, carelessly, as chance would have it, rises once again from all things, even less visible than before, joyous by the law within, and ascends and is suspended and forms the heavens, so too from out of you there came the new arising of all that had fallen in us, and it domed the world with music.

  Your music: if only it could have mantled the whole world, not merely us! If only a Hammerklavier17 could have been built for you in the Theban desert, and an angel would have led you out to that solitary instrument, out through the mountains of the wilderness where the kings and courtesans and anchorites lie at rest. And he would have sprung aloft and away, fearful that you would begin.

  And then, you mighty spring, you would have poured forth, unheard, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure. The Bedouins would have hastened by, keeping a superstitious distance; but the merchants would have cast themselves down on the ground, out on the edges of your music, as if you were a tempest. Only a few lone lions would have prowled around you at night, alarmed at what was within themselves, threatened by their own troubled blood.

  For who will take you back now, from ears grown lascivious? Who will drive them out of the concert halls, those venal ones whose hearing is barren, prostituting themselves but never conceiving? The semen spurts out, and they lie beneath it like whores and play with it, or it falls among them like the seed of Onan18 while they lie pleasuring without issue.

  But if ever a virgin with an untouched ear were to lie with your sound, Master, he would die of bliss, or he would grow pregnant with the infinite, and his fertilized brain would needs burst for sheer birth.

  [25] I do not underestimate it. I know it takes courage. But let us suppose for a moment that someone does have the courage de luxe to follow them, and then to know for ever (for who could forget or confound it?) where they creep away to and what they do with the rest of the livelong day and whether they sleep at night. That in particular needs to be ascertained: whether they sleep. Still, it takes more than courage. For they do not come and go as other people do, whom it would be easy to follow. One moment they're there, the next they are gone, like lead soldiers positioned and then moved somewhere else. They are found in places that are somewhat off the beaten track, but by no means concealed. The bushes recede, the path describes a slight curve around a plot of lawn: there they stand, with a vast transparent space about them, as if they were standing beneath a glass dome. You might take them for people out for a walk, lost in thought, these unprepossessing men of slight build and in every respect modest. But you would be mistaken. Do you see the left hand feeling for something in the slant pocket of that old overcoat, and finding it, and pulling it out, and holding a little something up in the air, awkwardly, attracting attention? In less than a minute, two or three birds have appeared, sparrows, hopping up inquisitively. And if this man manages to satisfy their very precise conception of immobility, there is no reason why they should not come even closer. And at length one of them flies up and for a while flaps warily on a level with that hand, which (God knows) is holding out a small piece of tired sweet bread in its undemanding, manifestly unexpectant fingers. And the more people gather around him – keeping the right distance, of course – the less he has in common with them. He stands there like a candle burning down, the remainder of the wick still glowing, warm through and never moving an inch. And how it is that he tempts and entices them is beyond anything that the many witless little birds can judge. If there were no onlookers, and he were left standing there long enough, I am certain that an angel would suddenly appear and, overcoming an aversion, would eat the stale, sweet scrap from out of that withered hand. But it is the people who prevent this from happening, as they always do. They ensure that only the birds put in an appearance; they claim that that is quite enough, and insist that he expects nothing else. And what else should he expect, this old rain-sodden puppet, stuck in the ground at a slight angle like ships' figureheads in small gardens back home?19 Is he standing like that because at one time he was right at the forefront, where movement is greatest? Is he so faded now because once he was bright and colourful? Will you be the one to ask him?

  Ask the women nothing, though, if you see them feeding the birds. One might indeed follow them; they scatter feed as they walk, and it would be easy. But let them be. They don't know how it came to be this way, but suddenly they have a large amount of bread in their bag, and they're holding out large chunks from under their thin shawls, chunks that are slightly chewed and moist. It does them good to know that their saliva is getting out a little into the world, that the small birds will fly about with that taste in their mouths, even if, of course, they presently forget it again.

  [26] There I sat with your books, you headstrong man,20 trying to form an opinion of them, as others do who have not read you all of a piece but have taken a part for themselves and been satisfied. For I did not yet appreciate the nature of fame, that public demolition of one who is in the making, on to whose building site the mob irrupt, knocking his stones all over the place.

  Dear youngster, somewhere or other, in whom something is burgeoning that makes you tremble: make good use of the fact that no one knows you! And if those who see your worth as nil contradict you, and if those you keep company with abandon you completely, and if they would destroy you on account of your tender thoughts – why, what is that manifest danger, which gives you your inner strength, compared with the wily enmity of fame that will come later, which renders you harmless by scattering you piecemeal?

  Ask no one to speak of you, not even with contempt. And if time passes and you realize that your name is on people's lips, do not take this more seriously than anything else you find in their mouths. Think instead that your name has become a wretched thing, and cast it off. Adopt another, any at all, so that God may call you in the night. And keep it a secret from everyone.

  You loneliest of men, living apart from the rest, how they have caught up with you in your fame! Not so long ago they were fundamentally opposed to you, and now they treat you as their equal. And they take your words with them, caged in their presumption, displaying them in public squares and baiting them a little, from a safe distance. All your terrible beasts of prey.

  I first read you when they were breaking loose, out of me, and attacking me in my wilderness, these desperate creatures – desperate as you were too at the end; you whose course is wrongly charted on all the maps. Like a crack it crosses the heavens, the hopeless hyperbola of your path, which bends towards us only once and then draws away in horror. What difference did it make to you whether a woman stayed or left, whether this man was overcome with vertigo and that with insanity, and whether the dead are alive and the living seemingly dead – what difference did it make to you? All of these things you took to be wholly natural; you passed through them as one might through an ante-room, without pausing. But on the far side you lingered, bowed over, where the events of our lives boil and precipitate and change colour, deep inside, deeper within than anyone had ever been; a door had opened for you, and now you were in amid the retorts, in the glare of the flames, in where you never took anyone with you, mistrustful man – there you sat, determining the points of change. And there, since to reveal was in your blood rather than to fashion or express, there you made the mighty d
ecision to focus solely on the tiny things that you yourself had at first perceived only through the lens, and to magnify them so that they would be plainly visible, in all their enormity, to thousands. So your theatre came into being. You could not wait for this life virtually without spatial substance, condensed by the centuries into drops, to be discovered by the other arts and gradually rendered visible for those few who, little by little, would come together in their insight and at length demand to see these sublime whisperings confirmed in the parable of the scene unfolding before them. You could not wait for that. There you were, and you had to determine and note down things that could scarcely be measured: an increase of half a degree in a feeling; the angle, which you read at close quarters, at which a will almost unburdened reacts; the slight cloudiness in a drop of longing; and that infinitesimal change of colour in an atom of trust. For life was now to be found in such processes, our life that had slipped into us and had withdrawn so deep inside that it was hardly possible to conjecture about it any more.