The Dark Interval

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  There should be no fear that we are not strong enough to endure any and even the closest and most horrible experience of death. Death is not beyond our strength, it is the highest mark etched at the vessel’s rim: We are full whenever we reach it, and being full means (for us) a feeling of heaviness, that something is difficult…that is all.—I do not mean to say that one should love death. But one should love life so generously and without calculating and selecting that one automatically always includes it (the half turned away from life) in one’s love, too. This is what actually happens each time in the vast movements of love, which cannot be arrested or contained! Only because we exclude death in a sudden fit of reflection has it become increasingly strange for us and, since we kept it at such a distance, something hostile.

  It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself….What do we know of it?! Our efforts (this has become increasingly clear to me over the years, and my work has perhaps only this one meaning and mission, to bear witness to this realization, which so often unexpectedly overwhelms me ever more impartially and independently…perhaps more visionarily, if that does not sound too proud)…our efforts, I believe, can aim only at assuming the unity of life and death so that it may gradually prove itself to us. Since we are so prejudiced against death we do not succeed in releasing it from its disfigurations…I urge you to believe, my dear Countess, that death is a friend, our most profound and perhaps the only friend who is never, ever misled by our actions and vacillations…And I do not mean this, of course, in that sentimental, romantic sense of renouncing or opposing life, but it is our friend especially then when we most passionately and profoundly consent to being here, to change, to nature and to love. Life always says at once: Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe it!) is the true yes-sayer. It says only: Yes. Before eternity.

  Just think of the “Sleeping Tree.” How good that I just thought of it. Think of all of the small pictures and their inscriptions—how, in your youthful innocent faith, you always recognized and affirmed both in the world: the sleeping and the waking, the bright and the dark, the voice and the silence…la présence et l’absence. All the presumed opposites which converge somewhere in one point where they sing the hymn of their union—and this place is, for the time being, our heart!

  Always steadfastly yours,

  Rilke

  TO COUNTESS MARGOT SIZZO-NORIS-CROUY

  APRIL 12, 1923

  Château de Muzot sur Sierre, Valais

  My dear honorable Countess:

  It is time for me to send some personal words after the two small packages that I mailed last week. Above all, I want to say thank you for the kindness and friendship of your letter dated March 10. You should know that I have read it again and again to be close to you and to completely understand and grasp the current condition of your pain. It must be very deep since you have been able to penetrate into its far, becalmed reaches (few people, simply because they mistrust pain, ever get there—), and it also must be very truthful since you have been able to pursue it into its most physical symptoms and experience its two extremes: completely in the mental sphere, where it so infinitely exceeds us that we experience it as nothing any longer except silence, a pause, as an interval of our nature, and then again, suddenly, at its opposite end, where it is like bodily suffering, a clumsy, utterly pointless children’s pain that makes us moan. But is it not wonderful (and is it not somehow an act of maternal care) to be given in this way a tour of the contrasts of one’s own nature? And indeed you often experience it as a kind of initiation and induction into the Whole and as if nothing evil, nothing deadly in an evil sense could happen to you ever again after you have gone through this elementary suffering just once in a pure and truthful manner. I have often told myself that this was the urge or (if one may put it like this) the sacred ploy of the martyrs to demand to get done with pain, even the most horrific pain, the excess of all pain—that which otherwise spreads randomly in smaller or larger doses of bodily and mental suffering over the course of a life and blends into its moments. They wanted to summon and conjure up this entire capacity for suffering at once so that after it, past such endurance, there would be nothing but beatitude, the uninterrupted beatitude of beholding God, which nothing can disturb any longer when all has been overcome. The loss that now casts its deep shadow over you is also a task to endure and a matter of coming to terms with all of the suffering that may befall us—for once the mother leaves us, we lose all protection. You have to undergo the terrible process of becoming more resilient. But in return…(and you have also begun to feel this already) in return the power of protection now becomes yours, and all the gentleness which until now you had been able to receive will blossom more and more inside of you into your new capacity to share it as something—inherited and acquired unspeakably, at the deepest price—of your own.

  I have suggested to you more than once that I am increasingly motivated in my life and in my work by the aspiration to correct everywhere our old repressions that have distanced and gradually alienated us from the secrets which would let us live out of infinite abundance. People have been scared and terrified by life’s horrors; but is there anything sweet and wonderful that has not, from time to time, worn this mask, which is one of horror? Life itself—and we know nothing else besides it—isn’t it horrific? But as soon as we admit its horror (not as an opponent, for how could we measure up to it? but somehow trusting that this very horror is entirely ours and merely at this moment still too great, too expansive, too ungraspable for our hearts which are still learning), as soon as we affirm life’s most frightening horror at the risk of dying (that is, of our excess!), we gain a hint of the greatest bliss that is ours at this price. The person who has not at some point accepted with ultimate resolve and even rejoiced in the absolute horror of life will never take possession of the unspeakable powers vested in our existence. He moves along the edge and, once the decision is made, will have been neither one of the living nor one of the dead.

  To prove the unity of horror and bliss, these two faces of the same divinity, indeed of this single face that presents itself differently depending on the distance and disposition from which we perceive it: That is the essential meaning and conception of my two books, one of which, the Sonnets to Orpheus, you now hold already in your kind hands.

  Over Easter I had some friends here to whom I read (for the third time now) the poems out loud. Each time I discovered how much a few small and casual remarks can aid in their understanding. But for that they must be read out loud in person. While I was thus reading the other evening I thought of you, dearest Countess, and I was filled with such a strong desire to look through this book with you, page by page, in order to present to you each individual poem in all of its strength. I now know there is not a single one that is not clear and rich with meaning, even if a few of them are placed so close to the unspeakable secret that they cannot be explained but only…endured. But I learned how much my voice unwittingly contributes to their explication if only because it still reverberates with the whole mystery of their creation, which is then transmitted to the listener via indescribable vibrations.

  If I am not mistaken, I have already told you that these peculiar Sonnets to Orpheus had not been planned or anticipated. They arrived, sometimes many in one day (the book’s first part was created in about three days) without warning in February of last year while I was actually trying to regain my focus to continue those other poems, the great Duino Elegies. I could do nothing but accept, without altering or resisting, the dictation of what had built up inside of me. I also only understood after some time that and how these stanzas refer to the figure of Vera Knoop who passed away at the age of eighteen or nineteen. I had not known her well and saw her only a few times in life, when she was still a child, even if then I had certainly been strangely intrigued and moved. Even though I did not put them in this order (with the exception of a few poems at the b
eginning of the second part, all the sonnets remain in the chronological sequence of their creation) it ended up that in each of the two parts only the penultimate poems refer explicitly to Vera, or address or evoke her figure.

  This beautiful child who first took up dancing and caused a stir among all those who saw her back then, thanks to her body’s and mind’s innate art of movement and transformation—unexpectedly explained to her mother that she could not or did not want to dance any longer (this happened right at the end of childhood). Her body changed in strange ways and became, without losing its beautiful Eastern shape, strangely heavy and massive…(this was already the beginning of the mysterious glandular disease which would then so rapidly lead to her death). During the time that remained, Vera took up music and finally confined herself to drawing, as if the dance she had had to give up found ever quieter and more discreet expression through her…I knew her father, Gerhard Ouckama Knoop, who had spent the greatest part of his life as an engineer at Knoop’s great textile factories in Moscow. Later he had to retire from this position due to a strange heart condition that stumped his doctors. He moved with his wife and two daughters (Vera was the younger one) to Germany, and still had time to write several books which have not remained unknown but perhaps do not give an adequate sense of this modest man’s absolutely unique way of experiencing life. His final years must have been full of fantastic insights and realizations, and the process of his dying, perhaps helped by the particular condition of his heart, was a complete detachment from the here and now in an indescribable purification of his spirit….He died knowingly, and in some ways flooded by insights into eternity, and his final breath arrived on a breeze from the angels’ wings he had set trembling….I did not know him well either, since in Paris, where he visited me only once, I did not have an opportunity for closer contact with him…But from the beginning we had shared the kind of instinctual trust and mutual joy that does not need further proof, and which perhaps originated in the same source as the startling inspiration that now so incomprehensibly inspired me to erect this gravestone for young Vera!

  It would be too much if I now tried to offer comments on a few individual sonnets, and I also would like to keep this as a reason for a future meeting. I thought it justified to share these hints with you so that you may at least read the book correctly. They will make some things clearer and be a gentle guide for your reading hours.

  It’s perhaps also useful to know that Sonnet XVI (of the first part), page 22, is addressed to a dog: I intentionally did not want to make this explicit, since that would have seemed almost again like the exclusion (or at least differentiation) of the creature that I specifically wanted to absorb completely into our experience. (I wonder whether one can surmise or would have guessed that here a dog is being addressed?)

  I conclude, honorable Countess. The anemones! I wonder what you thought of them (if they reached you in still somewhat recognizable shape). Last year someone told me that this dark-purple furry kind of pasqueflower grew only in the Swiss canton of Valais. As inexperienced as I am unfortunately in botany, I was happy to believe it. But today someone passed through who called the small flower with degrading familiarity “cow-” or even “kitchen-bell” and assured me que c’était tout ce qu’il y a de plus commun [that it was most common]. Well, that alone would not make them any less beautiful but it still got me wondering, since the way in which it appears here as the first growth in the rocky terrain, enveloped in the care of its silvery fur to shelter it from any mishap, it really appears rare and noble. Had you known it? Does it grow like this in Hungary?

  I had music here around Easter—that’s the one thing I still have to tell you—wonderful music. It was really an event for me since so rarely I am able to be receptive to music (and perhaps I don’t even wish or dare to be open to it more frequently). My Swiss friends brought along a very young violinist who, they assured me, is already considered among the best and most extraordinary artists on her instrument.

  She played Bach for me for three days, almost exclusively Bach—and how, how! She handled her violin with such maturity and such certainty, and with such resolve. (This is how fates and lives would have to run their course, but this kind of taut strength [and this precision], which harbors and shelters gentleness inside of it, only exists in a realm without fate.) The young artist, Alma Moodie (Scottish on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s, born in Australia, currently working with [the violinist and teacher Carl] Flesch in Berlin), is soon going on a concert tour in Romania…If she passes through Hungary to play in Pest and you can arrange it, please, go and listen to her.

  I gave her (for Romania) the delightful book by Princess Marthe Bibesco, Isvor, le pays des saules [“Isvor, Land of Willows”], in two volumes. A book filled with deep experiences of the local people’s lives and sentiments which have been passed down through ancient traditions, with pages of purest perception and poetry: Would you like me to send it to you? (I think it is difficult to obtain French books abroad.)

  I remain your humble servant and gratefully yours,

  Rilke

  TO CLAIRE GOLL

  The German-French writer Claire Goll (née Studer, 1901–1977; Rilke called her Liliane) was married to the poet Yvan Goll (1892–1951). She met Rilke for the first time in 1918 after sending him a book of her poems. They had a brief affair and maintained a friendship thereafter. The letter refers to the death of her father.

  OCTOBER 22, 1923

  Currently: Bern, Hôtel Bellevue

  Liliane,

  Before writing this to you I had torn up another letter that I had written two nights ago, since I do not feel like telling you anything “general” at the moment when you demand my empathy and attention. And yet, tell me, how to find those particular words that will be valid exactly for you, since I have learned only via the abbreviated announcement of the type of affliction that now puts you to an immensely difficult test.

  You see, I think that now, since you are confronted for the first time with having to suffer death in the death of the person who is so infinitely close to you, all of death (somehow more than only your own, possible death), that now is the moment when you are most capable of truly perceiving and recognizing the pure secret which, believe me, is not that of death but of life.

  Now it is necessary, in an unspeakably and inexhaustibly magnanimous gesture of pain, to include death in life, all of death, since through someone precious to you it has moved within your reach (and you have become related to it). Make it part of life as something no longer to be rejected, no longer denied. Pull it toward you with all your strength, this horrific thing, and as long as you cannot do that, pretend that you are comfortable and familiar with it. Don’t scare it off by being scared of it (like everyone else). Interact with it or, if that is still too much of an effort for you, at least hold still so that it can get very close, that always chased-off creature of death, and let it cuddle up to you. For this, you see, is what death has become for us: something always chased away that no longer had a chance of revealing itself to us. If at the moment when it hurts and devastates us, death were treated by even the simplest person with some familiarity (and not with horror), what confessions would it share when it—finally—passed over to him! Only a small moment of open-mindedness toward it, a brief suppression of prejudice, and it is ready to share infinite intimacies that would overwhelm our tendency to endure it with trembling hesitation. Patience, Liliane, nothing but: patience.

  Once you have been granted access to the Whole and thus been initiated, you solemnly celebrate your own true independence. You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree. And as your own sense of difficulty is concerned, you will soon realize that it has posited a
new measure for your existence and a new standard for your suffering and endurance.

  I offer a bit of advice, Liliane; I am trying nothing more but to be close to you with these simple words. On some later occasion you will tell me whether they were of any use, for nobody comes close to true assistance and consolation, except by an act of grace.

  Rainer

  (P.S. After some longer travels, a spa treatment, and other changes, I am on my way back to Muzot.)

  TO MAGDALENA SCHWAMMBERGER

  Magdalena Schwammberger (1892–1979) was from Burgdorf near Bern, Switzerland. She met Rilke after one of his public readings in Switzerland in 1919.

  DECEMBER 23, 1923

  Château de Muzot s/Sierre

  (Valais)

  My dear miss:

  Do I need to say it? Do I need to assure you? I read your recent letter with the same attentiveness and joy as the earlier, first one. If I didn’t respond, it was due to a lot of things I had needed to catch up on (returning to Muzot quite late in the year) and, to tell you everything, also because I have not been well.