You Must Change Your Life (18 page)

When Rilke unfolded her reply a few days later, the sight of that familiar upright penmanship, so like his own, put him instantly at ease. She professed that the Rodin book had nearly rendered her speechless. “That you gave yourself to your opposite, your complement, to a longed-for exemplar—gave yourself the way one gives oneself in marriage—. I don't know how else to express it,—there is for me a feeling of betrothal in this book,—of a sacred dialogue, of being admitted into what one was not but now, in a mystery, has become,” she wrote. It was “beyond doubt” the most important work he had published to date. “From now on you can depend on me,” she promised.

Rilke's hands shook as he held the letter. He didn't know where to begin with his reply, he had so much to tell her. “I won't complain,” he lied, unable to prevent the outpouring of anguish that followed. He
told her about the three fevers he had suffered that winter, the torment of Paris and his recent writer's block. “I can ask no one for advice but you; you alone know who I am,” he said.

With that, the “two old scribblers” eased back into their old habit of letter-writing as if nothing had happened. Rilke told her about how many of his youthful fears still haunted him. He sometimes felt so invaded by the lives of others that he worried whether the boundaries between him and them might break down altogether. Other people's misery seeped into his mind like ink bleeding across paper. Did he even possess a self of his own? Perhaps not, he once thought, telling Andreas-Salomé, “There is nothing real about me.”

He gave her an example of one such trauma that had arisen in Paris. He had been on his way to the library when he found himself walking behind a convulsive man displaying what Dr. Charcot would have called St. Vitus' dance. The man's shoulders shuddered, his head nodded and jerked. He walked in syncopated skips and hops. Rilke watched him with such curiosity that he felt as if his vision had tunneled inside the man's body. He saw the tension accumulating in his muscles, gradually crescendoing toward the explosion of spasms that was sure to come.

At the same time, Rilke felt a similar pressure start to rise in his own body, as if he had contracted the man's ailment visually. He could not help but follow him through the streets, “drawn along by his fear [which] was no longer distinguishable from my own.”

After describing this episode across several pages of the letter, Rilke concluded that the day had ended in utter derailment. He never made it to the library—how could one read after such a shock? “I was as if consumed, utterly used up; as if another person's fear had fed on me and exhausted me.” This sort of thing happened all the time, he said. But instead of transmuting these fears into art, they swallowed up his creativity. How, he asked Andreas-Salomé, might he learn to channel such powerful feeling into poetry?

Her answer was unequivocal: You already have. She wrote back to him that his description of the man had resonated with her so vividly
that it no longer lived only within him, but in her, too. He could stop worrying about whether he would ever realize his talent and accept now that he already had—its evidence was right there in that last letter.

Having begun an intensive study of Freudian psychology, Andreas-Salomé recognized Rilke's anxiety as a common
fin-de-siècle
-era symptom. Growing concerns over crowds and urban alienation had pushed many theorists of the mind to adopt a more sociological approach to their work. The inquiry into individual consciousness that had led Descartes to declare, “I think therefore I am,” three hundred years earlier now became a question of, how do other people think? And how do we even know that other people have selves?

The latter was the question to which Rilke's old professor Theodor Lipps's empathy research eventually led him. He had reasoned that if
einfühlung
explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. Rilke's prodigious capacity for it, then, was both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross.

Andreas-Salomé understood this predicament and urged Rilke to let his defenses down. He should nurture his gift as if it were a seed growing inside him: “You have become like a little plot of earth into which all that falls—and be it even things mangled and broken, things thrown away in disgust—must enter an alchemy and become food to nourish the buried seed . . . it all turns to loam, becomes
you
.” He should approach the sick and the dying like a pickpocket, scavenging their misery for poetry.

Rilke tried to take her advice and identify with the convulsive man rather than block him out. He had already learned to “see into” animals and flowers, and now he could advance like an artist from still lifes to human models. Perhaps the spasmodic pace of the convulsive man was not so different from that of a poet, he thought. Both were people who simply moved through life differently than others.

He began to reassemble these perceptual fragments in letters to Andreas-Salomé over the coming months. Gradually, an image emerged not only of the sights and sounds of Paris, but of a person who might experience them. Rilke gave this figure a name, Malte Laurids Brigge. The protagonist of what would become Rilke's only novel, Malte is a young Danish poet and, like Rilke, he, too, goes to Paris and must defend himself against the onslaught of stimuli. And he, too, is disturbed by the sight of a man with a Tourette's-like tic, recounted in
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
almost exactly as Rilke described it in his letter. As Rilke drifted away from his friends and family in the coming months and years, Malte was to become his closest companion.

RILKE AND WESTHOFF'S REUNION
with the Worpswede community was not a happy homecoming. Heinrich Vogeler had spent the last year planting a garden, renovating his home, and now had a second baby on the way. Rilke, the newly stoic disciple of Rodin, was disappointed to see that his old friend had made domesticity, rather than art, his primary creative act. His embrace of conventional comforts conflicted with Rodin's gospel, leading Rilke to conclude that the Worpsweders seemed “small and inclined toward irrelevancies.”

They, meanwhile, were no more impressed with Rilke and Westhoff, particularly when the couple demanded two separate rooms. Rilke's monograph on the Worpswede artists came out earlier that year and had not gone over well in the community. Rilke had accepted the assignment purely for the money, without necessarily thinking very highly of its subjects, apart from Otto Modersohn. But since he had not wanted to disparage them, either, he suspended judgment from the text altogether. Instead he wrote portraits of young artists “in the process of becoming,” as he explained in the introduction. He described their childhoods and their lives in the colony. When Becker read the book she found the writing pompous and the mythologized content irrelevant. “There is a lot of talk and beautiful sentences, but
the nut is hollow at its core,” she said. It couldn't have helped that Rilke managed to omit Becker—the colony's best painter—from the book completely.

The Rilkes underwent another unhappy reunion that summer when they paid a visit to Ruth, who was living in an old farmhouse nearby with Westhoff's parents. She was now a wild toddler, running naked outdoors. She had somber blue eyes that did not recognize her parents at first. She came up to Rilke tentatively and, after a few days, took to calling him “man” and “good man.” He felt incapable of addressing her with the attention she surely wanted. The pressure to bond with this mysterious little life unsettled him. Caring for her forced him out of his solitude and all but assured that he would disappoint her. By the end of August, he was eager to leave Worpswede behind.

It felt like as good a time as any for Westhoff to take Rodin's advice and study the sculpture in Rome, as he had once done. Rilke decided to join her for a “Roman winter” and pursue his newfound interest in Gothic architecture. Rilke would have preferred to live deeper in the countryside, but they rented a villa just outside the city for a few months. Then, as spring set in, so did the sound of German-speaking tourists, closing in on Rilke like soldiers cresting a hill. Westhoff stayed in Rome, but Rilke could not bear to stick around for another season.

He took off wandering the Continent again, from Rome to Sweden and Denmark. He had started writing
Malte
in Italy, but since his young protagonist was Danish, Rilke now felt the pull to go to Copenhagen, “Jacobsen's city.” In those days, “it was difficult to reach Rilke,” recalled his friend and fellow writer Stefan Zweig. “He had no house, no address where one could find him, no home, no steady lodging, no office. He was always on his way through the world, and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.”

Westhoff forwarded Rilke his mail in Scandinavia, including, in July, a two-month-old letter from Franz Kappus. Rilke was grateful to her for sending it, explaining that the young man was “having a hard time” then. Kappus had apparently been worrying about whether
having had a difficult childhood had drained him of all his strength for adulthood. It must have been an especially fretful note, for Rilke praised his “beautiful concern about life.” He agreed that “sex is difficult; yes” and told him that he had waited to reply until he had had some thoughtful advice to impart. His miserable summer in Worpswede had finally shown him his message.

Outgrowing your friends is a deprivation that frees yourself for growth, he told Kappus. As the world around you clears out, others may become fearful of the solitude you possess. But one must remain “sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence of joy, which they could not understand.” One must seek nourishment in that emptiness, which, thought of another way, is a vastness. As one moves more deeply inside it, be kind to those left behind.

Rilke had advised the young poet to forgo the big romantic questions in his first letter: “Do not write love-poems,” he had said. As Rodin had taught Rilke, simplicity precedes significance and small things often grow into big things, like the cell or the seed that eventually sprouts to life. That was why Kappus should focus now on everyday “things,” the “things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring.”

NO MATTER WHERE RILKE
traveled, sicknesses flared up along the way: an oppressive toothache, a stinging in the eyes, an inflamed throat, “mental nausea.” Worse, he had no will to write and no means to earn a living. Unlike other writers of his ilk, Rilke refused to dilute his practice with a trade like teaching or journalism. Toward the latter he felt a special “nameless horror” because reporters had to operate within their times and he felt resolutely out of touch with his. Instead, Rilke claimed these in-between phases for “research.”

He considered returning to school but decided that maybe he'd done too much studying already. All of that reading “words about words” and “conceptions of conceptions,” what had it really taught him? Even
at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he had grazed vast pastures of French literature only to realize that when he lifted his head from the book he had produced pages of notes, but no writing of his own.

In May 1904, Rilke decided to design his own syllabus for an independent course of study. It was an ambitious and sprawling agenda that included learning Danish, reading the Grimm Brothers dictionary, reading biology books, writing monographs on Jens Peter Jacobsen and Ignacio Zuloaga, reading Jules Michelet's history of France, translating literature from Russian and French, attending scientific lectures and experiments, and writing his new book: a work of “firm, close-knit prose,” which would become
Malte
.

There was little art history or philosophy on his list. He wanted to ground himself instead in the “real.” To study nature was like gathering the rocks and leaves that would sink him into the earth. “There are starry heavens, and I do not know what mankind has learned about them, I do not even know the disposition of stars,” he said at the time. Wouldn't such an education “enable me to attack and hold onto my work with greater confidence, would it not also be a means of reaching that ‘
toujours travailler
' which is the crux of everything?”

For Rilke, all of life became an education. Every city, every emotion was a subject to master. As Rilke was devising his new curriculum, he wrote to Kappus to tell him that even love should be treated as a subject of inquiry, perhaps the foundation course. “To love is good, too” because loving is “difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

This logic created a lifelong paradox for Rilke. If learning demands solitude, then learning to love also required doing so without other people. “Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another,” he told Kappus. The outlines of two people must remain clear, and if they can endure love “as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play
. . . then a little progress and an alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.”

There was also a second task on Rilke's syllabus: “Discovering some specific person willing to help me, so that the general process of education can become an affair between two people.” For that he wanted a “teacher of stature,” but also someone who was patient. Someone who would be willing to mentor him one-on-one and endure his many “questions and wishes, with my huge wealth of inexperience,” he wrote.