The Dark Interval Read online

  For me, my cherished friend, for me, however, it is in the form of a tremendous obligation to my innermost, most serious, and (even if I reach it only from a distance) most blissful self that I was granted possession of these pages on the first evening of a new year.

  Yours,

  Rilke

  TO COUNTESS ALEXANDRINE SCHWERIN

  Alexandrine Schwerin (1880–1957) was the daughter-in-law of Countess Luise von Schwerin, who met and then invited Rilke and his wife, Clara, to stay at her country residence, Castle Friedelhausen (near Frankfurt) in the summers of 1905 and 1906. Her husband was Count Eberhard (Ebo) von Schwerin. The letter likely refers to the death of her father, Philipp Friedrich Alexander Fürst zu Eulenburg (1847–1921).

  JUNE 16, 1922

  Château de Muzot sur Sierre (Valais)

  My dear Countess:

  Just as sometimes, when one tries two keys on an organ at once, an entire storm of sound erupts, you have allowed me over here to feel the entire sudden excess of suffering that now makes up your life! I could not write since I had visitors staying here at Muzot, one after the other, long-awaited friends—but I still cannot write now, after they have left, for what has struck you there, especially the second blow which extends so far into the future, eludes any direct expression of sympathy. Believe me, my dear Countess, that my silent and heartfelt thoughts are with you…And also from my heart, with Count Ebo!

  Where each of us may find the sources of consolation when thus afflicted by a loss is a question of personal experience and fate. I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. For it is unthinkable that this ever possible, providential pain, which is so often aimed at and inflicted upon human beings, is inconsolable. This pain in particular allows the most personal and sweetest consolation to come to ripen for us: The greatest, nearest, and most pressing human loss in particular shelters the fruit of consolation most reliably. Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off—it reveals itself for those who can trust it, in spite of its overwhelming and dire appearance, as a kind of initiation. By way of loss, by way of such vast and immeasurable experiences of loss, we are quite powerfully introduced into the whole. Death is only a relentless way of making us familiar and even intimate with the side of our existence that is turned away from us (what should I stress more: “our” or “existence”? Both carry the heaviest emphasis here, as if counterbalanced by the weight of all of the stars!).

  I can write to you in this way especially since you are in Friedelhausen, where my own lengthy period of learning about these matters began with the death of your mother-in-law, Countess Schwerin. What I began to learn back then with amazement and initially with disbelief, was strongly confirmed later by the loss of my father. He had been so dear to me that for my entire childhood the mere thought that one day he could no longer exist brought all of nature, both outside and inside of me, to a standstill.—But actually, under the influence of ever deeper initiation, nature eventually became more expressive, touching and moving to me with every loss that I suffered as if it brought me ever closer to its heart.

  If I were to visit Germany this summer or fall, dear little Friedelhausen would fortunately be along the way!—A thousand greetings sent with my enduring affection.

  Ever at your service,

  Rilke

  TO ELISABETH VON DER HEYDT

  Auguste Elisabeth von der Heydt (1864–1961) was the wife of the banker, art collector, and writer Karl von der Heydt. Rilke first met the couple in 1905, when he was invited to stay at their country estate. They became friends and patrons who maintained a long correspondence with him starting in that same year. The friendship cooled after Rilke supported the November 1918 revolution in Germany, which resulted in the end of the monarchy. The letter is written in response to the death of Karl von der Heydt and mentions the daughters, Gisela Maria (von Palm) and Gerda-Dorothea.

  AUGUST 17, 1922

  Château de Muzot sur Sierre/Valais, Switzerland

  Dear Mrs. von der Heydt,

  I am so very moved that I want to extend my hands to you: Please let me repeat in my own handwriting what I had already hastened to assure you in yesterday’s telegram, for all of my hours have been under the influence of the distressing news from the instant I received word. May you be able to feel that I am among those who were devoted to and attached to Karl von der Heydt because of his deep and quiet worth. It would be enough to grasp the nature of our relationship in this way to understand immediately that it will become most lasting based on my remembrance of him and augmented in its nature with an unspeakable amount of melancholy and awe.

  Even the brief announcement of his death gave me a palpable impression of the powerful example of patience and forbearance that he presented to your eyes and heart for the last few years, and how he proved daily his just and pure endurance and ultimate courage.

  I would like to think that I had not been as distant from all of that as it appears to be, given the circumstances. And yet, in spite of this tangible inner closeness, I am now overwhelmed by the self-reproach that in the recent and also more distant past I had not been more communicative with the loyal and understanding friend of so many years. My silence was partly caused by worries and concerns, which kept my pen in check because I realized that one should write to him only in a cheerful tone. I had also been quite happy to be able to prepare truly good news for him for the very near future: Soon I would have written to tell him about the completion of a great work that had lingered in uncertainty for ten long years. I waited to make this announcement only because I hoped to send him, ideally at the same time with the letter, a few selections as well. I have pictured many times that especially this new and quite slowly grown work would have been as dear and near to him as was, once upon a time, the Book of Hours, which was actually the true basis of his heartfelt and often helpful confidence in me which I have been so honored to acknowledge! The sudden deprivation not to count Karl von der Heydt any longer among those who will receive this book one day is one of the most sensitive areas of my pain which is otherwise nourished by such deep memories…

  May I ask you to remind Baroness Palm and her family, and especially Gerda-Dorothea, that I feel myself included in their great affliction through the awareness of my own loss. All of you may grant me this painful right on which I also draw for the privilege, dear Frau von der Heydt, of remaining loyally yours in old friendship for the future.

  Yours,

  Rilke

  TO MARGUERITE MASSON

  Marguerite Masson (1887–1972) was the sister of the painter Odette Ruffy (1892–1915). Antoine Contat, vice chancellor of Switzerland and a patron of the arts, introduced her to Rilke in 1922.

  JANUARY 4, 1923

  Château de Muzot sur Sierre

  Valais

  Dear Madame:

  After receiving your letter I was very happy that Monsieur Contat had allowed me to write to you and send the book [Duino Elegies] which had been destined for you, because of what you say about your life: that its most painful event was also the greatest. This is, basically, the secret thesis of these pages, and it is perhaps even the innate belief that brought them into existence—this conviction that what is greatest about our existence and renders it precious and ineffable also makes very careful use of our painful experiences to enter into our soul. It is true that sometimes also happiness may serve as a pretext to initiate us into that which, by its very nature, surpasses us. But in such cases it is much easier to understand right away that it wants only the best for us, although it is surely no less difficult to make use of this good we receive in the midst of happiness than it is to acknowledge that there is something positive at the bottom of the absences inflicted
on us by pain. Every day when looking at these beautiful white roses, I ask myself whether they are not the most perfect image of this unity, and (I would even say) this identity of absence and presence that perhaps forms the fundamental equation of our life? The writings of Malte L. Brigge represent only a first step or two in that direction. One would have to go there much more forcefully and, above all, one would have to make it one’s mission to destroy those ancient and inherited doubts that separate us from the best part of our own strengths. We distrust those strengths to the point that we let them become strange to us, because they offer or impose on us, depending on the circumstances, other ways of permanence than those we believe to be compatible with our personality. It is a blessed moment of inner life when one decides or resolves from now on to love with all one’s strength and unflinchingly that which one fears the most, that which has made us—according to our own measure—suffer too much. Don’t you believe that once such a decision has been made, the word “separation” is nothing but a name stripped of all meaning, unless it were the wonderful anonymity of an infinite number of discoveries, unheard-of harmonies, and unimaginable encounters…

  I thank you, dear Madame, for this beautiful, silent photograph. It keeps the fragile memory in balance when one places enough white roses on the other side.

  Yes, please do me the honor, if one day you should come to Muzot with Monsieur Contat (which I hope very much), to pay a visit to a longtime friend whom you will always find loyal and much obliged.

  R. M. Rilke

  TO COUNTESS MARGOT SIZZO-NORIS-CROUY

  Sizzo-Noris-Crouy (1891–1977) translated Rilke’s immensely popular prose poem “The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke” (published 1912) into French. They maintained a long correspondence. Her mother, Livia Crouy-Chanel (born in 1859), died in 1922.

  DAY OF EPIPHANY [JANUARY 6], 1923

  Château de Muzot sur Sierre, Valais

  My dearest, honorable Countess,

  Just a few days ago I reread your cheerful letter from the summer and couldn’t quite understand how my pen had become so tardy as to leave your kind and so richly communicative lines unanswered for so long. And yet I did not write right away! It is as if my pen—unfortunately we use the same for all of our writing, for work and our correspondence—absolutely insisted on some rest after the great efforts of the past year…

  And I needed rest, too! After such a great effort there always follows a period of feeling at a loss, not as if one were actually empty but because certain reserves of one’s being have been transformed, spent, and basically become forever unavailable for personal use. One doesn’t want to start looking right away for other inner property—one doesn’t quite know what one wants in this state of hesitating and gradually re-orienting oneself—and it turns out that during such periods one does not like to say “I.” For what could one say about such an “I,” without forcing oneself to make an effort? Often, during such moments in the past, I benefited from a change of surroundings that proved helpful both for getting rest and for starting something new. (Part of my restlessness might even be explained by the fact that each time when such a period of intensity ended, I rushed to accept any kind of external change as somehow helpful…). This time it was also perhaps going to be like this. I was determined to leave Muzot, whether to move back to Paris (which would have been useful for some research I have long planned), or whether to take a trip to our ancestral home, Kärnten, which I do not yet know, and to see whether it would be possible to settle there…The family crest, which dates back to what I think may be the fourteenth century, supposedly still exists, and may even have been regularly restored in the Assembly House in Klagenfurt. I myself, not only because I am the last male in my family, felt like the right person to complete a wide circle with a kind of homecoming there, if that is possible without using force, and to settle for some time in the place where, based on myth and written records, we originated. (“Csakathurn,” which is supposed to be one of the oldest estates of the Kärnten branch of the Rilke family, is, if I am not mistaken, a hereditary fief and title in the family of Count Festetics, one of your relatives!)—But then the slightest attempt to become mobile was instantly fraught with so many difficulties that I ultimately relented and locked myself in for another winter in Muzot, with the best intentions to make also this monastic period as productive as possible. I immediately accepted several different translation projects, which will probably keep me quite busy during the quiet months. I would have made more progress already if I did not experience health problems each time I make a somewhat more strenuous effort or get excited by something, which is probably also a result of the somewhat forced efforts of my previous period of work.

  All this about me, my dear, dear Countess! All of this, while your latest letter presented such an immediate and unexpectedly painful occasion to speak of you and to you. But especially because this is so very much needed, I wanted first to have made myself truly present to you again after such a long silence, so that the warm words of empathy which I feel so naturally compelled to address to you do not come to you from too vague a place. So that you may get a better sense of who speaks these words, and from what circumstances. Words…can they be words of consolation?—I am not sure about this, and I do not quite believe that one can or should be consoled for a loss as sudden and great as the one you just suffered…

  “Woe to those who have been consoled” comes close to what the courageous Marie Lenéru wrote in her remarkable and strange “Journal,” and here indeed consolation would be one of many distractions, a diversion, and thus at bottom something frivolous and unproductive. Time itself does not “console,” as people say superficially; at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order. And even this works only because later we pay so little mind and hardly give any consideration to that order to which time so quietly contributes, that instead of admiring everything that now softened and reconciled comes to rest in the great Whole, we treat it as the forgetfulness and weakness of our heart just because our pain is no longer as acute. Alas, how little the heart forgets—and how strong it would be if we did not stop it from completing its tasks before they have been fully and truly accomplished!—Not wanting to be consoled for such a loss: That should be our instinct. Instead we should make it our deep and searing curiosity to explore such loss completely and to experience the particular and singular nature of this loss and its impact within our life. Indeed, we ought to muster the noble greed to enrich our inner world precisely with this loss and its significance and weight…The more deeply we are impacted by such loss and the more violently it shakes us, the more it is our task to reclaim as our possession in new, different, and definitive ways that which, by virtue of being lost, is now so hopelessly emphasized. This would then amount to the infinite achievement of overcoming on the spot all the negative, sluggish, and indulgent dimensions that are found in every experience of pain. This is active pain that works on the inside, the only kind that has any meaning and is worthy of us. I do not love the Christian ideas of a Beyond, and I increasingly distance myself from them without, of course, thinking of attacking them. They may have their value and purpose, like so many other hypotheses about the divine periphery. But for me the danger is not only that they render those who have passed away less concrete and at least for the moment less reachable for us. But even we ourselves, in our longing for a beyond away from here, become in that process less concrete and less earthbound, while it is our obligation—as long as we are here and related to tree, flower, and soil—to remain earthbound in the purest sense, and even yet to become so! In my case what had died for me, so to speak, had died into my own heart. When I looked for the person who had passed away, he gathered inside of me in peculiar and such surprising ways, and it was deeply moving to feel that he now existed only there. My enthusiasm for serving, deepening, and honoring his existence there gained the upper hand almost at the same moment when t
he pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the entire landscape of my mind. When I remember how—often with the most extreme difficulties in understanding and accepting each other—I loved my father! During my childhood, my thoughts often became confused and my heart froze at the mere thought that at some point he might cease to be; my existence seemed to me so entirely determined by him (my existence which from the beginning was aimed in such a different direction!) that to my innermost self his departure was synonymous with my own demise. But death is so deeply rooted in the nature of love (if we only become cognizant of death without being misled by the ugliness and suspicions attached to it) that it nowhere contradicts love. Where to, finally, can death drive a person we have unspeakably borne in our heart but into that very heart, where would the “idea” of this beloved being and his unceasing influence (for how could this influence cease, which, while he was still alive among us, had already become more and more independent of his tangible presence)…where would this always secret influence be more secure than within us?! Where can we get closer to this influence, celebrate it more purely, and submit to it better than when it appears in concert with our own voices as if our heart had learned a new language, a new song, a new strength!—I reproach all modern religions for providing their believers with consolations and embellishments of death instead of giving their soul the means to reconcile and communicate with it. With death, with its complete and unmasked cruelty: a cruelty so horrific that it completes the circle by reaching all the way back to an extreme mildness which is as great, pure, and utterly clear (all consolation is murky!) as we never imagined the sweetest spring day to be! But mankind has never even taken a first step to experience this deepest gentleness, which, if even only a few of us truly received it, could perhaps gradually permeate and make transparent all conditions of life. Nothing has been done to experience this most abundant and soothing gentleness—except perhaps during the most ancient and guileless periods of the past whose secrets we have nearly lost. I am certain that the content of all of the “initiations” anyone ever experienced was nothing but a “key” that allowed us to read the word “death” without negating it. Just like the moon, life surely has a side that is permanently turned away from us, and which is not its opposite but its complement to attain perfection, consummation, and the truly complete and round sphere and orb of being.