R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 14
Rilke : We
don't know ourselves!
From
Rilke's Elegies of Duino, The Fourth Elegy, tr. by
A. E. Flemming
Not he!
Enough! However lightly he pretends to move:
he is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary man
who enters through the kitchen when coming home.
I will
not have these half-filled human masks;
better the puppet. It at least is full.
I will
endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire,
the face that is nothing but appearance. Here out front
I wait. Even if the lights go down and I am told:
"There's
nothing more to come," -even
if
the grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting down from the deserted stage
-even if not one of my now silent forebears sist beside me
any longer, not a woman, not even a boy-he with the brown and squinting eyes-:
I'll
still remain. For one can always watch.
Am I not
right? You, to whom life would
taste
so bitter, Father, after you - for my sake - slipped of mine, that first muddy
infusion
of my necessity. You kept on tasting, Father, as I kept on growing, troubled by
the aftertaste of my so strange a future as you kept searching
my unfocused gaze -you who, so often since
you died, have been afraid for my well-being, within my deepest hope,
relinquishing that calmness,
the realms of equanimity such as the dead possess for my so small fate -Am I
not right?
Rilke wrote his first letter to a young poet (the original
title is "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter") in the February
of 1903 and the last one in the December of 1908. He had already
written the "Book of Images". Read
more... Cf. Plato, Books
can be your worst enemies *
Jaspers, Truth is in
communication *
Kierkegaard, My work as an author
*
Emerson, Reading and writing as
self-knowledge *
Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as
moral activities *
Tom Schulman, Dead Poets
Society
*
Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face
*
J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
*
Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous
man
