The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  It is true that you were the child of actors, and when your parents performed they wanted to be seen; but you did not take after them. For you, this calling was to be what the nun's vocation was for Mariana Alcoforado,61 though she had no notion of it: a disguise, complete and durable enough for one to be unreservedly wretched behind it, with that ardour with which the invisibly blessed are blessed. In all the cities you visited, they described your manner; but they did not understand how, growing more hopeless from day to day, you would hold up a work of poetry before you, time and again, to see whether it offered concealment. You held your hair, your hands, anything opaque, before the translucent places. You dimmed with your breath those that were transparent; you rendered yourself small; you hid as children hide, and then you gave that brief, happy cry, and only an angel should have had leave to seek you out. But if you looked warily up, there was no doubt that they had seen you all the time, all of the people in that ugly, hollow space filled with eyes: you, you, you, and nothing else.

  And you wanted to hold out your crook'd arms towards them, making a sign with your fingers to ward off the evil eye. You wanted to claw back from them your vision, which they were preying upon. You wanted to be yourself. Your fellow-actors lost courage; as if they had been caged with a she-panther, they crept along the backdrops and said their lines, hoping not to anger you. But you drew them forward and placed them to the fore and treated them as if they were real beings. The loose doors, the make-believe drapes, the props that had no rearward side, brought out a spirit of contrariness in you. You felt how your heart grew capable of an immense reality, unstoppably, and in alarm you tried once more to remove their gazes from yourself, like gossamer threads – but already, in their fear of the very worst, they were breaking into applause: as if to avert, at the last moment, something that would oblige them to change their lives.

  [66] A poor life they lead, women who are loved, and a dangerous one. Ah, that they might surpass themselves and become women who love. Women in love are hedged about with security. No one is suspicious of them any longer, and they are in no position to betray themselves. In them the mystery is consummate; they cry it out whole, like nightingales, and it is not fragmented. They lament for one man; but the whole of nature joins with them, in the lament for an eternal being. They hasten after the one they have lost, but with the very first steps they take they already overtake him, and before them is only God. Their legend is that of Byblis, who pursued Caunus as far as Lycia. Her heart urged her on, following him through many lands, until at length her strength was quite used up; but so powerful was the emotion deep within her that, when she sank, she reappeared beyond death as a spring, all swiftness, a swiftly flowing spring.62

  What else was it that happened to the Portuguese woman, if not that she became a spring deep within? What became of you, Héloïse, or of you loving women whose laments have come down to us: Gaspara Stampa, the Countess of Die and Clara d'Anduze; Louise Labé, Marceline Desbordes, Elisa Mercœur? But you, poor fugitive Aïssé, you hesitated and gave in. Weary Julie de Lespinasse. The desolate history of a happy estate: Marie-Anne de Clermont.63

  I well remember how, one day at home, a long time ago, I came across a jewellery case; it was two hand's-breadths deep, shaped like a fan, with a border of flowers impressed in the dark green morocco. I opened it: it was empty. Now, after all this time, I can say it; but then, having opened it, I saw only what its emptiness consisted of: velvet, a little heap of light-coloured velvet, no longer fresh, and the grooved depression left where a piece had lain, empty, and lighter by just a trace of melancholy, fading into the velvet. It was possible to bear it for just a moment. But when we are confronted with those that remain behind, loved, perhaps it is always thus.

  [67] Leaf back through your diaries. Was there not always a time, sometime in spring, when the burgeoning of the year struck you all as a reproach? There was an appetite for high spirits in you, and yet, when you went out into the wide open, a sense of disconcertment was in the air, and your walk became unsteady, as on a ship. The garden was beginning; but you (that was it), you dragged in winter and the year that had passed; for you it was at best a continuation. While you waited for your souls to have their parts to play, you suddenly became aware of the weight of your limbs, and something like the possibility of illness pushed its way into your wide-open sense of what was to come. You blamed the too light dresses you were wearing, pulled your shawls about your shoulders, ran down the avenue to the very end: and there you stood, hearts pounding, in the wide-turning circle, resolved to be at one with all of it. But a bird sang out, and was alone, and disowned you. Ah, ought you to have been dead?

  Maybe. Maybe what is new is that we survive it: the year, and love. The blossoms and the fruit are ripe when they fall; animals are aware of their own being, and find each other, and are content with that. But we, who have embarked on the quest for God, we can never accomplish an ending. We keep postponing what our own nature prompts us to, needing even more time. What is one year to us? What are all the years? Even before we have embarked upon God, we are praying to Him: let us get through this night. And then illness. And then love.

  That Clémence de Bourges64 must needs die just as she was coming into bud – she who was without equal, she who was herself the loveliest of all the instruments she could play, finer than any other, unforgettable even in the merest sound of her voice. Her girlhood was of so high a resolve that a woman in love, in full flood, could dedicate to that growing heart a book of sonnets in which every line was unsated. Louise Labé was not fearful of scaring the child with the protracted sufferings of love. She revealed to her the nightly increase of longing; she promised her pain as if it were a larger world; and she sensed intuitively that she, with the griefs she herself had experienced, fell short of that obscure expectation that gave this young woman her beauty.

  [68] Oh, you girls back home – may the loveliest of you, one summer afternoon in the darkened library, find that little book that Jean de Tournes65 printed in 1556. May she take the cool, smooth-worn volume out into the murmurous orchard, or over beside the phlox, in the over-sweet fragrance of which there is a residue of pure sweetness. May she find it early. In those days when her eyes are beginning to relish gazing into themselves, while her mouth, younger, can still bite off much too large pieces of apple and be full.

  And then, girls, when the time for more passionate friendships comes, may it be your secret to call one another Diké and Anaktoria, Gyrinno and Atthis.66 May someone, perhaps a neighbour, an older man who travelled in his youth and has long been considered an eccentric, confide these names to you. May he sometimes invite you to his home, to taste his famous peaches or come up to the white passage to see his Ridinger engravings of equestrian subjects,67 which everyone talks of and which you really have to have seen.

  Maybe you can persuade him to tell stories. Maybe – who knows? – there is one among you who can talk him into looking out the journals he once kept on his travels. The same girl who will one day manage to coax him into disclosing those fragments of Sappho's poetry that have come down to us,68 and who will not rest until she has learned what is almost a secret: that this reclusive man was fond of occasionally using his leisure to translate these shards of verse. He has to confess that it has been a long time since he gave any thought to his translations, and what he did do, he assures her, is not worth mentioning. Nonetheless, if pressed by his ingenuous friends he will gladly recite a stanza to them. He even discovers the Greek text somewhere in his memory, and recites that too, because in his view the translation does not do it justice, and because he wants to acquaint these young people with this authentic and beautiful fragment of a massive, ornate language, wrought in so intense a fire.

  In the process, he warms to his work once again. He has evenings of beauty, indeed almost of youth – autumn evenings, for instance, with a vastness of peaceful night time before them. At such times, the light burns late in his study. He does not remain bent over th
e pages always, but often leans back and closes his eyes to ponder a line he has reread, and its meaning spreads through his blood. Never before has he felt so sure of ancient times. He could almost smile at those generations that wept for antiquity as for a lost play they would have liked to have parts in. Now he readily grasps the dynamic significance of that early unity that was in the world, that new and simultaneous gathering-in of all that humankind laboured at, as it were. It does not trouble him that that civilization, which was all of a piece and had an almost total capacity to make manifest, has appeared to many in later ages to form a whole and to be wholly past. It is true that there the celestial half of life really was fitted to the semicircular bowl of earthly existence, as two full hemispheres fit together to make one perfect golden orb. But scarcely had this occurred than the spirits confined within it felt that this absolute reality was no more than a likeness; the massive heavenly body grew weightless and rose into space, and its golden sphere hesitantly reflected the sadness of all that could not yet be subdued.

  As he thinks these things, the recluse in his night, thinking them and understanding them, he notices a bowl of fruit on the window sill. Acting on an impulse, he takes an apple from the bowl and places it before him on the table. How my life centres upon this fruit, he thinks. Around all that has been perfected there is the unachieved, and it grows apace.

  And, as he is contemplating what is unachieved, there arises before him, almost too quickly, that slight figure straining towards the infinite, whom everyone meant (according to Galen) when they said ‘the poetess’.69 For just as, after the labours of Hercules, all the destruction and reconstruction of the world cried out for fulfilment, so too, from the store of being, all the ecstasies and despairs which are the full, sole span of the ages crowded towards the deeds of her heart, to be lived.

  Suddenly he knows that resolute heart, which was ready to offer the whole of love, to the very end. It does not surprise him that it was misunderstood – that in this woman in love, who was so entirely of the future, people saw only excess, not a new yardstick for love and the grief of the heart; that they interpreted the legend writ through her life in a way that suited what could then be given credence; that at length they ascribed to her the death of those women whom the deity incites, each one alone, to devote themselves unreservedly to a love that is unrequited. Perhaps even among the girls whom she brought to love there were those who did not understand – that at the height of her powers she lamented not some one man who had left her to lie alone but rather that other, no longer possible, who might be equal to her love.

  At this point, the solitary thinker stands up and crosses to the window; his high-ceilinged room feels too confined; he would like to see the stars, if it is possible. He is not one to deceive himself. He knows that this emotion is filling him because among the young girls of the neighbourhood there is one who matters to him. He has wishes (not for himself, no, but for her); on her account he understands, in a passing hour of the night, the demands of love. He promises himself to tell her nothing about it. It seems to him that the very most he can do is to be alone and wakeful and for her sake to reflect how very right that loving woman had been when she grasped that the union of two lovers signifies nothing other than an increase in loneliness; when she cast aside the temporal purpose of sex for its final aim in infinity; when in the darkness of embraces she sought not satisfaction but longing; when she disdained the thought that, of two, one must be the lover and one the beloved, taking weak, beloved women to her bed and kindling them into women in love, till they left her. Through such supreme farewells, her heart became Nature herself. Beyond fate, she sang the epithalamia of each seasoned lover, sounding their nuptials and magnifying the coming bridegroom, that they might prepare for him as for a god and might even survive his glory.

  [69] One more time in recent years I felt your presence, Abelone, and understood you, unexpectedly, after I had long ceased thinking of you.

  It was in Venice, in the autumn, in one of those salons where foreigners passing through gather about the lady of the house, who is as much a stranger there as they. These people stand around with their cups of tea and are delighted whenever a well-informed fellow-guest turns them deftly and discreetly towards the door, whispering a name that sounds Venetian. They are prepared to hear the most exalted of names: nothing can surprise them, for, limited though their experience may otherwise be, in this city they blithely surrender to the most extravagant of possibilities. In their usual lives they are forever confounding the extraordinary with the forbidden, so that the expectation of something wonderful, which they now permit themselves, is evident on their faces as an expression of coarse licentiousness. The feelings they experience only in occasional moments at home, whether in concerts or alone with a novel, they exhibit blatantly in this flattering setting, as if rightfully theirs. Just as, wholly unprepared, unconscious of any danger, they allow the well-nigh lethal confessions of music to stimulate them as physical indiscretions might, so too, without even remotely mastering the existence of Venice, they surrender to the rewarding impotence of the gondolas. Couples no longer newly wed, who throughout the entire journey have merely snapped back unpleasantly at each other, lapse into a peaceable silence; the husband yields to the pleasant weariness of his ideals, while she feels young and nods encouragingly to the indolent locals, smiling as though she had teeth of sugar that were forever dissolving. And if you listen, it turns out that they are leaving tomorrow or the day after or at the end of the week.

  So there I stood among them, rejoicing that I was not leaving. Soon it would be cold. The soft, opiate Venice of their preconceptions and demands disappears with these somnolent foreigners when they go, and one morning the other Venice is there, the real one, wide awake, brittle to the breaking point, and in no way a figment of dreams: a Venice willed into being in the midst of nothingness, on sunken forests, a product of sheer force, and in the end so absolutely there. That toughened body, stripped to the bare essentials, through which the sleepless arsenal pumped the blood of its toil; and the body's importunate and forever expanding spirit, more pungent than the perfume of aromatic lands. That resourceful state, bartering the salt and glass of its poverty for the treasures of the nations. That fine counterweight of all the world, full – right down to its smallest ornament – of latent energies running ever more finely along the circuitry of nerves: O Venice!

  The consciousness of knowing the city filled me, among all those self-deluding people, with so strong a gainsaying spirit that I looked up, hoping to confide in someone. Was it conceivable that in those rooms there was not a single person who was unknowingly waiting to be enlightened as to the nature of the place? Some young person who would immediately understand that what was being offered here was not enjoyment but a display of willpower more exacting and severe than was to be met with in any other place? I walked about, made restless by the truth within me. Since it had seized hold of me here, among so many people, it was accompanied by the wish to be expressed, defended, proven. I had the grotesque notion that the very next moment I should clap my hands out of sheer hatred of all their chattering misunderstanding.

  It was in this ridiculous frame of mind that I saw her. She was standing by herself before a window filled with light, watching me; not exactly with her eyes, which were earnest and contemplative, but with her mouth, or so it seemed, which was ironically imitating the evidently annoyed expression on my face. At once I became aware of the impatient tension in my features and assumed an equable expression, whereupon her mouth resumed its natural haughtiness. Then, after a moment's reflection, we smiled at each other simultaneously.

  She recalled, if you will, a certain portrait of the young Benedicte von Qualen, the beautiful woman who played a part in Baggesen's life.70 It was impossible to behold the dark tranquillity of her eyes without surmising the clear darkness of her voice. The braiding of her hair and the neckline of her light-coloured dress were moreover so very much in the style of Copenh
agen that I was resolved to speak to her in Danish.

  But before I was close enough, a stream of people thrust towards her from the other side; our warm, rhapsodic, absent-minded Countess, who took such pleasure in guests, pounced upon her with a posse at her back, meaning to spirit her off on the instant to sing. I was certain the young girl would excuse herself on the grounds that no one in that company could be interested in hearing songs in Danish. And so she did, as soon as she could get a word in. The throng around this radiant figure pressed her all the more; one of them knew that she sang in German too. ‘And in Italian,’ added a laughing voice, with mischievous assurance. No excuse that I might have wished her to offer occurred to me, but I had no doubt that she would resist them. Already an expression of dry mortification was appearing on the faces of her petitioners, wearied from prolonged smiling, and already the good Countess, so as not to lose face, was stepping back with an air of pity and dignity, when suddenly, at a moment when it was no longer remotely necessary, the girl yielded. I felt myself grow pale with disappointment; my gaze filled with reproach, but I turned away, since there was no point in letting her see that. She, however, broke loose from the others and was suddenly at my side. Her dress shone upon me, the flowery fragrance of her warmth enveloped me.

  ‘I really am going to sing,’ she said in Danish, close by my cheek, ‘not because they want me to, or for the sake of appearances, but because I must sing now.’

  In her words there sounded the selfsame spiteful intolerance as she had just delivered me from.