The Dark Interval

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  I have not yet been able to get back to working productively. There is no one but me to chastise and reproach myself for not yet being far enough along to grow some new vines and spread a few leaves over the ruination of the past few years. Perhaps they are pushing through somewhere, but the surface is only rubble and desolation, with no new growth in sight. I ought to begin in any random spot, right now, today, immediately, but it’s not a matter of my being picky when, in spite of this realization, I am waiting for certain conditions which I expect to provide a kind of specific support. I am hoping for a small, old house and an old garden where I may spend a long period by myself with nothing but nature and a few things pulsing with the gentle rhythms of the past. Without this kind of support, I do not think I will be able to muster the concentration that would reveal to me the quietest, most guarded spot of my inner nature where new sources well up. I have already talked with your brother Banni of this need, which he understands completely and wholeheartedly!

  Now it’s a matter of finding out whether something like this exists somewhere. It almost came to pass here, if only on a provisional basis. I’ve taken up residence in this tiny mountain spot (barely an hour from the Italian border) in an ancient Palazzo named Salis, which has managed to hold on to its ancestral furnishings and an old garden edged by trimmed boxwood, even though decades ago all of it was turned into a hotel. To top it off, they have granted me access to the Count’s old library (otherwise off-limits for guests) with a room perfectly after my personal taste that reminds me of earlier arrangements where I had been most comfortable. Take good care of yourself. I will remain in Switzerland as long as it remains feasible, at this address—please write to me again.

  In friendship,

  Rilke

  TO ANITA FORRER

  Anita Forrer (1901–1996) was a Swiss graphologist. In 1919, she wrote to Rilke after she had seen him at a public reading. The “question” in this letter refers to Forrer’s query whether her somewhat older, female friend had understood the intimate nature of an encounter while Forrer was still innocent of such knowledge. Her family had sent Forrer to a therapist to break off the relationship. Rilke and Forrer exchanged a series of letters from 1920 until 1926, but met only once in person at the home of Nanny Wunderly-Volkart in 1923.

  FEBRUARY 14, 1920

  Locarno (Tessin)

  Pension Villa Muralto

  Dear Anita,

  Between half-packed suitcases and lots of distractions from friends visiting from near and far, I have left your two letters still without the kind of heartfelt response that I feel for each of the ones you send to me. I will tell you right away, Anita, that I have forgotten nothing. Your question to your friend, along with all the rest of your confusion, can definitely be blamed on that “educator.” It was, of course, what people call “a bit coarse,” this question, but the doctor’s intrusive actions were equally so. Here you have simply passed something along which was alien to you as well. You have to consider what kind of confusion and turmoil his explanations prompted in you, and so it was not much of a stretch to ask the beloved friend: Did you deliberately cause this disaster for me? The fact that your friendship broke up over this question, at least for the time being, was probably inevitable. For once this lingering suspicion had been introduced, all the conditions that can make a love unsuspecting and joyful had been suspended. Perhaps this loss is not as definitive as you think right now; perhaps one day your friend will understand the plight which caused you to ask this question—perhaps only a pause has occurred between you: One must let life run its course. The human being destroys so many things on his own, and it is not in his power to restore anything. Nature, by contrast, has all the power to heal as long one does not eavesdrop or interrupt it.

  It also makes me happy, Anita, that you have understood me. If only I had been able to take away this ghost of a burden from you earlier, since it is a shame for each of your young days that suffered through it. But now you are remaking everything for yourself with your cheerful confidence. Both of your letters confirm to me your renewal for which, by the way, I ought not take credit: Since it was you who wrote to me first, it had basically already occurred. All you needed was to speak with someone for a bit, dear child, to claim an inner property which had been entirely prepared in silence all along. What could I contribute to this, what would I ever be able to add to this? I could only show you what you had already obtained inside yourself. It still seems to me the most wonderful thing in life that the blunt and rough nature of any intrusion and even an obvious disturbance can become the occasion to create a new order within ourselves. It is the most splendid achievement of our life force that it finds a way of looking at evil as something good and fundamentally reverses it. Without this kind of alchemy we would all be evil, for everyone is touched and invaded by evil, and anyone could be caught at a given moment in being “bad.” Not to stay put in that place but to live, that is the secret. Nothing is more untenable than what is bad. No human being should ever think that he “is” bad; he only has to move ever so slightly, and instantly he isn’t bad anymore.

  Once I stood on a bridge in Paris and glimpsed from afar on a brick road leading down to the river a suicide victim, wrapped in an oilcloth, who had just been pulled from the Seine. Suddenly I heard someone next to me say something. It was a young blond carriage driver in a blue jacket, very young indeed, strawberry-blond, with an intelligent, cleverly pointed face. He had a wart on his chin sprouting a stiff bunch of red hairs almost cheekily, like a paintbrush. When I turned toward him, he gestured with his head toward the object that held both of our attention and said with a wink: “Dites donc, celui-là, s’il a pu encore faire ça, il aurait bien pu faire autre chose” [“So, tell me, this one, if he could still do that, he could have done something else”].

  I watched him, a bit astonished, as he was already walking back to his enormous cart heaped with rocks, for truly: What shouldn’t a person be able to achieve with precisely the kind of force that is needed to dissolve the powerful, tremendous attachments of life! From that moment on I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation. Farewell for today, Anita.

  Rainer

  TO ERWEIN FREIHERR VON ARETIN

  Von Aretin (1887–1952) was a German astronomer, journalist, editor, and author. Rilke met him in Munich in 1915, after which they maintained a long correspondence touching on subjects including astronomy and scientific discoveries. This letter refers to the death of his father, Anton Freiherr von Aretin.

  MAY 1, 1921

  Castle Berg am Irchel

  Canton Zurich, Switzerland

  My dear friend,

  Your most recent letter prepared me for how close you have been living to that great and nearest loss, which the announcement of last night now makes real to me.

  I would like to be with you in response as quickly as possible with a few lines.

  I am certain that you are filled with emotion yet composed, and under the influence of the pure and quiet laws which, given our limitations, can be nothing but mute and ruthless.

  Your mother will find in her faith that deepest consolation which originates in the very center of pain. May all of you feel able to make her condition of having been left behind gentle and forgiving.

  It is otherwise indeed our grief’s peculiar prerogative that on those occasions when it does not seem disturbed by the contradiction that we sometimes think of a life as apparently unfinished, interrupted, torn off, it is allowed to be a true act of learning, a true accomplishment, the purest, most consummate coming to our senses. And this coming to our senses is nowhere greater than in the unique task imposed on us when the l
oss of the father at his advanced age impacts us: It obliges us, in a way, to compose ourselves anew and to employ our inner capacities independently for the first time.

  As long as our father is alive, we are after all a kind of relief set against him (hence the tragic dimension of the conflicts). It is only this blow that turns us into completely rounded figures, free and, alas, freestanding on all sides…(the mother, always courageous, has placed us from the beginning as far outside as she could—).

  Only this, dear friend, by warmly extending my hands to you and thinking of you and yours.

  Always yours,

  Rilke

  TO NANNY WUNDERLY-VOLKART

  Nanny Wunderly-Volkart (1878–1962) was the wife of the Swiss industrialist Hans Wunderly. During the last years of Rilke’s life, after he had lost his citizenship when the Austro-Hungarian Empire ended after World War I, Rilke lived in Switzerland at the Château de Muzot (a small stone manor) which was first rented and then purchased for him by Wunderly’s cousin Werner Reinhart. Rilke and Wunderly-Volkart, whom he called Nike, maintained a long friendship and correspondence.

  JUNE 2, 1921

  Etoy

  […]

  The small news clipping that I have enclosed from the Figaro (entitled “L’autobus—char d’assaut” [“The passenger bus—tank”]): May I get it back at some point? I have reread it again and again, even though it contains only one of the infinite number of miscellaneous items that are reported each day by the dozen; (the Neue Zürcher Zeitung [newspaper] puts them always in one section, “Misfortunes and Crimes”; are misfortunes the crimes of fate?). Poor little Lucie Ramé from Essonnes, who is already unlucky enough to tap away all day behind a window on a typewriter, now a bus drives into that window and crushes her chest over the small heart…dear God: What for? Similar things have been reported hundreds and hundreds of times, but suddenly it’s no longer bearable! All of contemporary life (including “nonbelievers”) agrees perhaps only on one thing, which is not to draw any final conclusions from the death of Miss Lucie Ramé, although, to be precise, no news item can counter it. It means either: Death is such an indescribable, immeasurable value that God allows it to be inflicted on us at any time even in the most senseless manner, simply because he may not bestow anything greater on us. Or this news item can be read in this way: Our personal existence has no significance for God, and far from assigning it its duration, he knows nothing of its presence and of the unbelievable value we attribute to how long it may last. If this insight were experienced truly just once, it would certainly not cause the damage in freer minds that God would be denied; but it could succeed in demarcating the essential conditions of his existence against those of our own. Nothing makes us more incapable of truly experiencing God than our stubbornness in wanting to recognize his hand in those places where it has always been withheld. By imagining his involvement in so many things that matter to us, we probably overlook its signs and most glaring proofs as they become manifest elsewhere. So much of the sorrow which the war inflicted on me still resulted from my incapacity to reconcile the perishing of so many talented and indeed extremely distinguished individuals with God! We all carry in our blood some kind of misunderstanding of God’s “protection,” which cheats us of the freedom that belongs to us and whose first consequence (if we knew how to use it) would be a different relationship to death.

  The distance between birth and death above which we write “I” is not a measure for God; life & death constitute for him probably only a small degree of separation, and perhaps a continual series of lives and deaths is needed for God to have the impression: one. Perhaps only all of creation in its totality is permitted to call itself “I” before him, and all the fluctuations of appearing and vanishing inside it would then be its own concern.

  It is a shame that God did not know little Lucie Ramé; there is no way of letting him know that the bus crushed her to death—for even that bus, the “char d’assaut,” he never caught a glimpse of! We have to get used to the fact that we rest in the pause between two of God’s breaths: for that means: to be in time. It is conceivable that he was linked to creation only via the act through which he externalized it out of himself. In that case, only that which has not been created would have a right to think of itself as continually attached to God. The brief time of our existence is probably precisely the period when we lose all connection to him and, drifting apart from him, become enmeshed in the creation which he leaves alone. We can rely only on memories and premonitions, for there is surely an even more urgent task of applying our senses to what is present here and to expand them so much that they converge into a single sense of awe and admiration.—

  […]

  TO REINHOLD VON WALTER

  The writer and translator Reinhold von Walter (1882–1965) maintained a correspondence with Rilke between 1907 and 1921.

  JUNE 4, 1921

  Le Prieuré, Etoy

  Canton de Vaud, Suisse

  […]

  Whether I have made any progress in the kind of confidence and trust in death of which you write to me will also only become clear within that great work [of the Duino Elegies (1922)]. You are correct: We have been tasked with nothing as unconditionally as learning on a daily basis how to die. But our knowledge of death is enriched not by the refusal of life. It is only the ripe fruit of the here and now, when seized and bitten into, that spreads its indescribable flavor in us.

  […]

  Yours,

  R. Maria

  TO MRS. GERTRUD OUCKAMA KNOOP

  Gertrud Ouckama Knoop (1869–1967) was the wife of Rilke’s friend Gerhard Ouckama Knoop and the mother of Vera, a dancer and childhood friend of Rilke’s daughter, Ruth. In 1919, Vera died of leukemia after a long illness at age nineteen. Rilke resumed his correspondence with the bereaved mother only in 1921, who then sent him her daughter’s unedited diary of her last years. The letter was written in response to receiving this chronicle. Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, written in February 1922, bear the subtitle “A Memorial for Vera Ouckama Knoop.”

  [JANUARY 4, 1922]

  My dear friend,

  What can I say? Just as you did not find yourself able to add anything in your own words to the diary entries you copied for me in your last letter, I am now just as incapable of communicating anything concerning myself to you as long as I am still the reader of these pages, hunched over them, always, even when I look up. I had not had the slightest idea of any of this and did not even know anything specific about the beginnings of the illness, and now your letter introduced me all at once to something that touches, deeply moves, and overwhelms me in so many ways. If one were to read your account and it concerned any young girl whom one did not know, it would already be close enough. But now this is all about Vera whose dark and strangely concentrated charms remain so unspeakably unforgettable to me that I can recall them with immense immediacy. Right now, while writing this, I would be afraid to close my eyes lest I feel her charms completely overwhelm me in my being in the here and now.

  How much, how much, how very much has Vera been all of that for which these recollections of your pain offer such deep and irrevocable testimony. And—isn’t it true?—how wonderful, how unique, how incomparable is a human being! There, where everything was allowed to get used up which otherwise would have had to last for the duration of a long lifetime, there (where?) now suddenly occurred this abundance of light in the girl’s heart, and in it appear, in this infinite light, the two outermost edges of her pure insight: That pain is an error. That pain is a dull misunderstanding arising from our bodies which drives its stony wedge into the unity of heaven and earth—and on the other side this unified oneness of her heart open to anything, with its unity of the existing and the enduring world, this affirmation and acceptance of life, this joyful, heartfelt, and (up to the end) completely capable way of belonging with the here and now
—alas, only with the here and now?! No (she could not know this in those first attacks of decay and departure!)––with the whole, with far more than the here and now. Oh, how very, very much she loved, how she reached with her heart’s antennae beyond anything that could be grasped and encompassed here—during those tender floating pauses in suffering which were still granted to her, full of the dream of recovery…

  It seems, dear friend, that fate has taken great care to lead you each time beyond its usual edge along a stony precipice of life to the gorge of death, with an ever more exposed heart. Now you live and observe and feel out of infinite experience.—