Reading Rilke Read Online Free

by the wind. Rilke biographer Ralph Freedman, whose revisionist version I am relying on, shrewdly sums up Lou Salomé’s response: “The extent of the snub, a burden of embarrassment that seemed to have devolved from Rilke upon her, revealing him in all his inadequacy, may have hastened the end of their conjugal phase.” 8
    By train, by wagon, by Volga steamer, they reached Kiev, where they stayed in a hotel which appeared to rent rooms by the hour. In Saratov, the horse pulling their cab from station to pier went wild, nearly spilling them into the street. They missed the boat. Then it was Novgorod and finally a small distant village where, in a fit of romantic overreach (which was, alas, characteristic of both), they decided to stay close to the peasants by living next to a barnyard, sleeping on—now—separate straw mattresses, suffering porridge, splinters, and large noisy flies.
    Back in St. Petersburg, after only a day, Lou excused herself and went to Finland to visit her mother, leaving Rilke behind in a rooming house to howl. She stayed away a month, and then the couple—now uncoupled—came back to Berlin and regular business, which was accepting invitations. Heinrich Vogeler, whom the poet had commissioned to do the illustrations for his Stories of God , had invited his “patron” to visit him at Worpswede, an art colony which was located in bog country not far from Bremen—a spare flat land valued for its isolation and its light. The trip offered Rilke much-needed relief, and he arrived, one might say, panting. His dormer room overlooked the kitchen courtyard. From there, like a muezzin, he called out what the housekeeper sourly described as his prayers, and from there he also sallied forth in his Tartar boots and Russian smock to collect the smiles of the local peasants.
    For five weeks Rilke lived quietly among creative people. Worpswede’s simplicities, its communal dedication, its serenity, enchanted him. Here he met his future wife as well as the painter Paula Becker, whom he fancied first. Rilke kept a diary during this time, as he had in Florence at Lou’s behest. Paula appears in it as “the blond painter.” Poetic fragments and prose sketches fill its pages. These pieces often couple roses with sex in a commonplace way, and with death in an ominous one. Paula’s eyes are soft and warm as opening roses, he writes. Light glistens in them as from the tips and breasts of bent petals.
    Blooms, as Rilke knew, are all business; they exist for butterflies and bees, but only incidentally for us, for whom flowers are fortuitous. Autumn’s hues are even more serendipital; the function of the leaves has been fulfilled, so they are discarded, they are finished, and their colors are the result of useless residues. The beauty of the world happens only in our eye; even the allure of women is as utilitarian as a wagon’s wheel. The Worpswede light, the way the countryside’s colors glow even on a dim wet evening, the festive stars and the warm windows of distant farms, the comforting purl of a stream: those are the purest accidents. So when one of us turns aside from living in order to admire life; when a rose petal is allowed to cool an eyelid; when a line of charcoal depicts the inviting length of a thigh; we are no longer going in nature’s direction but contrary to it. Whatwas never meant for us becomes ours entirely; what never had a use is suddenly all we need. Gradually, what Rilke’s Russian adventure had appeared to teach him—how to live in harmony with nature, so appealing to the poet—would prove itself impossible for the poem.
    Rilke returned to Berlin and to a Lou who had already sent him back like a bad bottle. “I wish he’d go away,” she confessed to her journal. Rilke’s spirit is willing: he writes to Clara every day. He plans a third trip to Russia. But his several journalistic projects, designed to bring in a few marks, are not panning out, and his accounts are empty. He meets