I'd mention scenes from the book in class, or at the dinner table with friends. My students would always punctuate my narration with wondering silence, their eyes searching inwardly, as people do when a secret is revealed to them. A silence and a half later, almost always, one or two would start with a wow, and after that, the class will erupt with thoughts.
They'd ask about Rilke calling Paris the city where one goes to die--'isn't Paris where people go to declare their love?' They'd ask about other things, and they'd give examples for their own declarations.
But it's the silence before the Wow that I look forward to. It's those few seconds that comprise the pause that I tell the story for.
More often than not, it is in that silence that each of us becomes connected with each other. We become a singular energy. And while there are many many thoughts, we are united in thinking about one thing only.
Within that silence, I can see in my class's minds the images that Rilke so masterfully paints: a man holding in his hands a worn-out face, thinning and torn in some parts, as he sits forlornly on the Parisian sidewalks, forgetting for two seconds that he is sitting there exposed, faceless. Without a face.
The first person narrator, Malte, sees this from across the street, and shaken to his core by the sudden jolt of the faceless man now realizing his carelessness, Malte walks away hurriedly, realizing, poor men shouldn't be disturbed when they are thinking.
Within a silence and a half, our minds build the physical form of fear--this abstract concept suddenly comprehensible in tangible terms, through Rilke's words. Our hearts drive us out of ourselves, Rilke says, our hearts pursue us, and we are almost outside of ourselves and we can't get back in. Like a beetle that someone has stepped on, he says, we gush out of ourselves.
We gush out of ourselves, Rilke says. And like magic, it all makes sense.
Once, at a lunch with my mentor and her friend, we got around to talking about the laws of nature. A retired Physics professor, my mentor's friend brought home a point with an example: a heavily pregnant woman is often criticized as arrogant. Apparently, the arch of her back and the tilt of her head make her look like she is looking down on people. She explains, it's not arrogance but the woman's center of gravity that has shifted, requiring her to adopt what people perceive as a proud posture.
It was my turn to fall silent then. I remember the first few pages of Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge saying our deaths are born with us, and living is all just a prelude to a death that we should strive to be proud about. Regarding it this way, Rilke rearranges the hierarchy between life and death: it is death that matters more, and one's life becomes the condition with which one's death may be judged as good or bad.
The pregnant woman is proud, Rilke says, because she is carrying a life aside from her own, and with these, not one but two deaths.
But I did not say this out loud. I found myself keeping it for myself, like I keep from sharing the conclusion of Rilke's book. I can talk endlessly about this Rilke, but I have never once mentioned how it ends in class, or at the dinner table when I invite friends over. I fear that we reveal so much by how passionately we retell something we find beautiful. In this sense, it is us who decide whether we allow ourselves to be seen, and by whom.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge holds so much Seeing. Delicate sensibilities articulated in precise language. It talks about those who have taken to themselves the entire task of love; those whose strengths consist in being found.
It talks about beginnings. And it talks about endings--those conclusions one knows will eventually come. In Rilke's words, we are always painfully aware about 'partings one has long seen coming'. Cursed with this Seeing, we can only surrender, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure.
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