Rilke : Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

Letters of RAINER MARIA RILKE

VOLUME TWO, 1910 1926

To Lou Andreas-Salome

Duino Castle near Nabresina, Austrian Littoral

December 28, 1911

Let me imagine that you are all but waiting for a letter from me, otherwise this big sheet is not justifiable at all, and I really cannot take a smaller one. There is a chance at this time that you are at home and have quiet, it was always so between the two Christmases , so let me tell you about things for a few pages.

About you I heard through Gebsattel in the fall, but, you can imagine, he does not reflect complete pictures, he is like one of the mirrors doctors use for examination, so nothing whole was to be learned from him, but I did understand that things are going well with you and that agrees with everything I know about you, independently of all tidings.

You see, I am still in a hurry to get to myself, I still presume that this theme can be of interest; would you like to go into it once more? Please, please, do, I will help you, as best I can, perhaps I'll be bad at it, in that case there is a point of departure: Make Laurids Brigge. I need no answers to my books, that you know, but now I deeply need to know what impression this book made on you. Our good Ellen Key naturally confused me promptly with Make and gave me up; yet no one but you, dear Lou, can distinguish and indicate whether and how much he resembles me. Whether he, who is of course in part made out of my dangers, goes under in it, in a sense to spare me the going under, or whether with these journals I have really got for fair into the current that is tearing me away and driving me across.

Can you understand that after this book I have been left behind just like a survivor, helpless in my inmost soul, no longer to be used? The nearer I came to the end of writing it, the more strongly did I feel that it would be an indescribable division, a high watershed, as I kept telling myself; but now it turns out that all the water has flowed off toward the old side and I am going down into an aridity that will not change. And if it were merely that: but the other fellow, the one who went under, has somehow used me up, carried on the immense expenditure of his going under with the strength and materials of my life, there is nothing that was not in his hands, in his heart, he appropriated everything with the intensity of his despair; scarcely does a thing seem new to me before I discover the break in it, the rough place where he tore himself off.

Perhaps this book had to be written as one sets a mine; perhaps I should have jumped way away from it the moment it was finished. But I suppose I still cling too much to possession and cannot achieve measureless poverty, much as that is probably my crucial task. My ambition was such that I put my entire capital into a lost cause, but on the other hand values could become visible only in this loss, and that is why, I remember, Make Laurids appeared to me for the longest time not so much as a going under, rather as a singularly dark ascension into a remote neglected part of heaven.

It is almost two years: dear Lou, you alone will be able to grasp how falsely and precariously I have spent them. I thought when they began I had a long, long patience; how often since then have I patched it, what all have I not shredded and tied on. I have gone through so much that was confusing, experiences like that of Rodin simply going wrong in his seventieth year, as though all his endless work had not been; as though something paltry, some sticky trifle, such as he had surely pushed out of his way by the dozen before, not leaving himself time really to get through with them, had lain in wait there and overwhelmed him easily and now day by day is making his old age into something grotesque and ridiculous , what am I to make of that sort of experience? A moment of weariness, a few days of slackening sufficed then, and life rose up about him as unachieved as about a school boy and drove him, just as he was, into the nearest wretched snare. What am I to say, with the little bit of work out of which I keep falling completely, if he wasn't saved? Shall I wonder that life-sized life treats me downright scornfully in such interims, and what in all the world is this work if in it one cannot go through and learn everything, if one hangs around outside it allowing oneself to be shoved and pushed, grabbed and let go, becoming involved in happiness and wrong and never understanding anything.

Dear Lou, I am in a bad way when I wait for people, need people, look around for people: that only drives me still further into the more turbid and puts me in the wrong; they cannot know how little trouble, really, I take with them, and of what ruthlessness I am capable. So it is a bad sign that since Make I have often hoped for someone who would be there for me; how does that happen? I had a ceaseless longing to bring my solitude under shelter with someone, to put it in someone's protection; you can imagine that in those conditions nothing made any progress. With a kind of shame I think of my best Paris time, that of the New Poems, when I expected nothing and no one and more and more the whole world streamed toward me merely as a task and I replied clearly and surely with pure work. Who would have told me then that so many relapses were before me! I waken every morning with a cold shoulder, there, where the hand should lay hold that shakes me. How is it possible that now, prepared and schooled for expression, I am left in fact without a vocation, superfluous? In the years when Ilya of Murom sprang up, I sit myself down and wait, and my heart knows of no occupation for me. What will you say, Lou, when you read this? Did you foresee it? I remember a passage from your last letter, which I haven't here: "you are still going so far," you wrote. And if not, what is to be done in order not to go bad in the standstill? What is to be done?

I am thinking less than before of a doctor. Psychoanalysis is too basic a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than this disorder.

On the other hand I still busy myself from time to time with the idea of pursuing a few subjects consistently at a little country university. You smile, you are familiar with that, yes, there is little that is new with me, and the worst of it is that certain of my plans and perhaps even my best and worst qualities have sense only with relation to a certain age and beyond that are simply absurd. Indeed it is almost too late even for the university, but you know what I mean by that; the terrible thing about art is that the further one gets in it, the more it commits one to the highest, almost impossible; here enters in spiritually what in another sense the woman in the Baudelaire poem means who in the great stillness of the full-moon night suddenly bursts out: que c'est un dur metier que d'etre belle femme.

Here, Lou, is another of my confessions. Are the symptoms those of the long convalescence which my life is? Are they signs of a new sickness? I wish I could be with you once for a week, to hear and to tell. It has been so long. I get about so much, shouldn't it be possible to meet sometime?

Do you know that last winter I was in Algiers, Tunis and Egypt ? Unfortunately under conditions so little suited to me that I lost my seat and bearing and finally followed along just like someone a runaway horse has thrown off and drags along up and down in the stirrup. That wasn't the right thing. But a little Orient was instilled into me anyway, on the Nile boat I even went in for Arabic, and the museum in Cairo perhaps made something of me after all, confused as I was on entering.

This year I am enjoying the hospitality of friends here (for the time being all alone) in this strong old castle that holds one a little like a prisoner; it cannot do otherwise with its immense walls. And at least the practical disorder in my affairs will benefit by my being taken care of here for a few months. Beyond that I know nothing and want to know nothing.

Goodbye, dear Lou, God knows, your being was so truly the door by which I first came into the open; now I keep coming from time to time and place myself straight against the doorpost on which we marked my growth in those days. Allow me this dear habit and love me.

Rainer.