The Dark Interval Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Ulrich Baer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780525509844

  Ebook ISBN 9780525509851

  randomhousebooks.com

  modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Victoria Allen

  Cover image: Kathy Collins/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1. “We must learn to die.”

  Adelmina Romanelli, December 8, 1907

  2. “No constellation is as steadfast…as a connection between human beings.”

  Countess Lili Kanitz-Menar, July 16, 1908

  3. “The weight of this unexplained…event…

  presses us…more evenly and more deeply into life.”

  Elisabeth Freiin Schenk zu Schweinsberg, September 23, 1908

  4. “Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you.”

  Sidonie Freiin Nádherná von Borutín, August 1, 1913

  5. “I tend to think of physical pain as…utterly senseless.”

  Ilse Erdmann, October 9, 1915

  6. “Transience is not separation.”

  Adelheid Franziska von der Marwitz, January 14, 1919

  7. “An initiation into one’s own life.”

  Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 21, 1919

  8. “Such a great weight…has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile.”

  Adelheid Franziska von der Marwitz, September 11, 1919

  9. “Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”

  Anita Forrer, February 14, 1920

  10. “Our grief’s peculiar prerogative…to be…

  the purest, most consummate coming to our senses.”

  Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, May 1, 1921

  11. “We rest in the pause between two of God’s breaths: for that means: to be in time.”

  Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, June 2, 1921

  12. “But our knowledge of death is enriched…”

  Reinhold von Walter, June 4, 1921

  13. “This unified oneness of her heart…this joyful, heartfelt…way of belonging with the here

  and now.”

  Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, January 4, 1922

  14. “A relentless way of making us…intimate

  with the side of our existence that is turned

  away from us.”

  Countess Alexandrine Elise Klara Antonia von Schwerin,

  June 16, 1922

  15. “How he proved daily his just and pure endurance and ultimate courage.”

  Elisabeth von der Heydt, August 17, 1922

  16. “This identity of absence and presence that perhaps forms the fundamental equation of our life.”

  Marguerite Masson, January 4, 1923

  17. “Time itself does not ‘console.’ ”

  Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923

  18. “We gain a hint of the greatest bliss that is ours at this price.”

  Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923

  19. “The solitude into which you were cast…makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others.”

  Claire Goll, October 22, 1923

  20. “For people…permanently caught in sorrow…there is only one liberation.”

  Johanna Magdalena Schwammberger, December 23, 1923

  21. “Destiny’s vagaries pass to us in more ways than only via what is real or visible.”

  Rudolf Friedrich Burckhardt, April 14, 1924

  22. “Life is already so rich on its own that it surpasses all of our means and all of our measures.”

  Catherine Marthe Louise Pozzi, August 21, 1924

  23. “We are the transformers of the earth.”

  Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925

  Rainer Maria Rilke: Life and Works

  Translated and Edited by Ulrich Baer

  About the Author

  My life is not this steeply sloping hour

  Through which you see me hasten on.

  I am a tree standing before my background

  I am but one of many of my mouths

  The one that closes before all of them.

  I am the rest between two notes

  That harmonize only reluctantly:

  For death wants to become the loudest tone—

  But in the dark interval they reconcile

  Tremblingly, and get along.

  And the beauty of the song goes on.

  RILKE, The Book of Hours (1905)

  Preface

  Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke addressed in direct and personal letters individuals who were close to him, who had contacted him after reading his works, or whom he had met briefly—anyone with whom he felt a kind of inner connection. At the time of his death in 1926 at the age of fifty-one, Rilke had written more than fourteen thousand letters, which the poet considered to be as significant as his poetry and prose. Especially for readers less familiar or comfortable with poetry, Rilke’s letters offer original yet accessible thoughts on the role of love, death, and art in our lives.

  Within this vast correspondence, there are about two dozen letters of condolence. In them, Rilke writes about loss and mortality, assuming the role of a sensitive and serious, yet ultimately uplifting guide through the unavoidably painful dimensions of life. These letters, gathered here into one volume for the first time, together tell a story leading from an unflinching acknowledgment of death to profound personal transformation. When read on their own, each of the letters may offer solace for anyone dealing with loss. They may likewise provide a blueprint for finding the right words to convey sympathy and compassion to those in mourning. What can you say in the face of loss, when words seem too frail and ordinary to communicate our grief and soothe the pain? These letters offer guidance in our effort to provide solace for the bereaved, and to not let loss and grief overwhelm, numb, and silence us.

  Rilke believed that it was our responsibility to try to make sense of our condition and circumstances here on earth, rather than devote ourselves to imagining a realm of greater meaning where suffering may cease. He also distrusted the major political ideologies of the modern age, which provided comfort via collective identities, overarching causes, or abstract ideals. He thought the best we can do is to live fully, by which he meant being receptive to the richness of life, not only in easy times but also during “the dark interval,” as a poem in The Book of Hours (1905) puts it, when life brings hardship and loss. It is possible to avoid a true awareness of the fact that life entails loss, that between the two notes of birth and death we pass through “the dark interval,” which includes parting but ultimately contributes to life as a beautiful song. We can distract ourselves, cling to the words and teachings of others that gloss over our pain, or assume preformed identities via religion or ideology that spare us from the difficult and hard work of acknowledging and e
nduring suffering. But the price for such refusal, Rilke feared, was a less aware, less intensely lived life, or a life lived on someone else’s terms. Not really confronting the presence of death would perhaps let us live a happy and stable life, in a conventional sense. But it would be a life that is less deep and—during the dark moments when we experience a loss or, if we ourselves are spared major afflictions, help others in mourning—ultimately less strong, or even feel less real.

  The letters collected in this book are prompted in most cases by the death of a recipient’s loved one. Rilke wrote most of them almost instantaneously after receiving the terrible news of someone’s death, and in several of the letters you can feel this urgency from the very first line—Rilke all but skips a proper address and its formalities to leap right into the most difficult matter, which is the death mourned by the letter’s recipient. At other times he takes a few sentences to make himself fully present to the other person so that he can be with them, through his language, when they are all alone. Time is critical when someone has lost a beloved person, and Rilke knew that an immediate response could lessen the terrible, gaping solitude that had opened up in someone’s life. A condolence letter would not fill this loss. But if Rilke responded right away, the fact that he had thrown himself into confronting the death of the beloved person head-on in his letter, rather than relying on conventional formulas of sympathy, meant a great deal to those to whom he wrote. We know this because these men and women cherished Rilke’s letters like talismans, the way one may keep love letters for a lifetime. Indeed, some of the letters sound so intimate and are so strongly felt that they read like love letters, since Rilke aims straight at the heart of his recipients with his unsparing yet deeply empathetic exhortations to confront, acknowledge, and grow through grief. A few of the recipients had been Rilke’s lovers at earlier moments in his life. But the intensity of love, or an intimacy shared by genuine concern for the other’s experience, is tangible in each letter. With these letters, Rilke presented the gift of enduring language to people who had suffered and often been all but reduced to silence by profound loss. His language lasted, in the hands and memories of his recipients, and has now been passed down to us, even after all of them have died themselves.

  For today’s readers, these letters serve as models of how to address a grieving person right away, without searching long, often for too long, for the right words and appropriate phrasing. There is something almost seductive about Rilke’s letters. This impression is not due to lingering romantic feelings, but because Rilke aimed to bring the bereaved back into communication, and coax them back into the conversation that we call life, right at the moment when they felt most cut off from the world. He gave them words when those were lacking, and told them there is a way to articulate their pain even if that pain constricts their hearts and throats. These letters are gifts of language. But they are also more than that.

  Rilke beseeches the addressee (and thus also us, since Rilke wrote his letters in the awareness and with the expectation that they were likely to be published later) not to evade the pain that life brings us. “Death does not exceed our strength,” Rilke writes in one of these letters. He implores the recipient, who has just lost someone dear to her, not to withdraw from life out of fear of the nearly unbearable pain. Remain in life, Rilke exhorts her, continue to work on the many things the deceased person could not complete, touch the unspeakably mute and lifeless clothes and things, now heavy with grief, which the beloved person had so recently imbued with life. This is Rilke’s unceasing counsel for those who have lost someone they love. Stay with your pain, and instead of shrinking away from it, use it to forge another path back into life.

  Rilke’s letters of condolence are both subtle and stern, and he remained skeptical about easy consolation. “Woe to those who have been consoled,” Rilke quotes the early-twentieth-century and now all but forgotten French playwright Marie Lenéru in one of his letters. He cautions against consolation since it can be a diversion instead of healing, and because consolation can become a superficial and almost heartless admonition to get over the loss, to move on, and ultimately to forget. Time, writes Rilke, does not “console, as people say superficially, at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order.” After the great stillness of loss, gradually life begins to become normal again. The hours and days swing back into their habitual rhythms, which were so violently disrupted by death. The grieving person has to eat, breathe, regain less fitful sleep, and the world and its people, which had been circling around the great stillness at an awkward distance, start to encroach again. But that is not consolation. The wound heals but it does not disappear. A stillness and an absence remain, which sometimes hurts unexpectedly.

  A few of the letters were written after longer periods of thought. They tap into Rilke’s lifelong reflection on what ways life is interlaced with loss, and how we can find meaning in life without simply assuming that death is its stark opposite. A greater meaning, encompassing both life and death alike, is usually found in realms available only through faith. But just as life is continually transformed through the rhythms of creation and loss, Rilke insisted that we are capable of transforming our experiences on earth into something new and inherently meaningful without recourse to faith. As a poet, Rilke used words like very few other writers not only to express experiences but to create distinct experiences for us. But all of us, and not only poets, have the capacity to transform our experiences of loss into a renewed awareness of life. How does Rilke know this? Because we have the capacity to love, where through the encounter with another person our life is transformed. Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life. Or, differently put, through love and death we learn that life entails the loss of self-control and the loss of others, and that a true awareness of this fact presses us more deeply into life.

  This is why Rilke does not sugarcoat the necessary confrontation with pain in these letters but admonishes the recipients to use pain to reconnect with life. He wants the individuals to whom he speaks not to retreat into bitter loneliness but to recognize that life is also, and perhaps above all in the moments of intense pleasure and pain wrought on us by love and death, transformation. We should explore, as painful as it may be, in what specific ways a particular loss impacts our life. This will allow us to use our pain to transform our life actively, instead of being hopelessly subjected to inevitable suffering. Instead of denying death and loss, we ought to explore more deeply what life has to offer in all of its dimensions. We should gingerly explore where the borders between mental and bodily pain begin to blur, and become aware while suffering a loss—this is critical for Rilke—that the beloved person now lives on in our memories and daily conduct.

  When my father died a painful death after a difficult and humiliating illness, I was at a loss for words. It was only a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which I had experienced in downtown New York. Occasionally when I inhaled, now separated forever from my father who had lived and died at a considerable distance, in Germany, the air I drew into my lungs seemed still to reverberate with the tremors of the attacks. Weeks and months passed. But instead of allowing life to gradually run its normal course again, with the confidence that each new day would present me with many things—good and bad, but nothing that would overwhelm me—I had to make great efforts to have even one normal hour. Each morning after waking up, I was jolted back into the awareness and pain of my loss, as if finding myself back in a prison of pain from which sleep had allowed me to escape for a spell. For the rest of the time, during the days when the unusually beautiful fall weather in New York turned to a mild winter and then spring, I was on guard, ready to retreat at any moment from anything that would make me feel even a bit out of the ordinary, lest it would trigger another loss of control. There were very few moments during those numb days when I was not taut with apprehension of an
y intense emotion, and there were few moments—I realize only in retrospect—when I felt relaxed enough simply to be.

  I looked for counsel, guidance, and consolation, but could not find much. Only in Rilke’s letters did I discover the empathic attention that I needed. During this long period of disequilibrium, when I feared that consciously lived life was going to slip forever out of reach—a life of choices made deliberately yet boldly, and in keeping with my true self—I grasped at these letters for support. It says perhaps something about me that I could connect with a writer very far away when I couldn’t connect easily to the people nearby or to the professionals devoted to helping me to come to terms with my loss. But I tend to think that Rilke’s letters said something absolutely unique that nobody else had the courage or wisdom to share.

  I did not understand very much of what the poet had written to long-forgotten people nearly a hundred years earlier. How was pain going to lead me more deeply into life, when my fear of new upheaval kept me from being open to any experience—including positive ones—since I could not hope to control them? I read and reread Rilke’s letters. I felt less alone, and the letters slowly led me to think that my pain was maybe not something to be overcome but rather a way forward into life. Over a period of many months, they guided me in the direction of actual life, that daily life of surprises and the unknown from which I had withdrawn out of fear. I had been on my way to shutting myself off from experiencing anything, lest it overwhelm me. Rilke’s words became companions and signals directing me back into life.

  In particular, there was a passage from one of Rilke’s letters from the year 1908 that I had stumbled upon, quite by accident, in an old book shortly after my father’s death. I read these words out loud, in a dazed state and through tears, at my father’s funeral. Then I started repeating them over and over like a mantra: