Thursday, February 16, 2012

(an excerpt from rainer maria rilke's

novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated from german by m.d. herter norton)


      I think I ought to begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see.  I am twenty-eight years old, and almost nothing has been done.  To recapitulate:  I have written a study on Carpaccio which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage", which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses.  Ah!  but verses amount to so little when one writes them young.  One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good.  For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough),- they are experiences.  For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, people and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.  One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars- and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.  One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again.  But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.  And still it is not yet enough to have memories.  One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until they come again.  For it is not yet the memories themselves.  Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves- not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
      But all my verses had a different origin; so they are not verses.  And when I wrote my drama, how I went astray.  Was I an imitator and a fool that I needed a third person to tell of the fate of two human beings who were making things hard for each other?  How easily I fell into the trap.  And I ought to have known that this third person who pervades all lives and literatures, this ghost of a third person who never was, has no significance and must be disavowed. He is one of the pretexts of Nature who is always endeavoring to divert the attention of people from her deepest secrets.  He is the screen behind which a drama unfolds.  He is the noise at the threshold of the voiceless silence of a real conflict.  One is inclined to think that heretofore they have all found it too difficult to speak of the two concerned.  The third, just because he is so unreal, is the easiest part of the undertaking; him they have all been able to manage.  From the very beginning of their plays one notices their impatience to arrive at this third person; they can scarcely wait for him.  The moment he appears all is well.  But how tiresome when he is late.  Absolutely nothing can happen without him; everything stops, stands, waits.  Yes, and how if this damming and stagnation kept on?  What, Sir Dramatist, and you, public that knows life, what if he were found missing, this popular man-about-town or this arrogant youth, who fits into every marriage like a master-key?  What if, for example, the devil had taken him?  Let's assume this.  One suddenly observes the unnatural emptiness of the theaters; they are bricked up like dangerous holes; only the moths from the rims of the boxes tumble through the unsupported void.  The dramatists no longer enjoy their villa quarter.  All the public detective agencies search on their behalf in remote parts of the world for the irreplaceable third person who was the action itself.
      And all the time they were living among people- not these "third" persons, but the two, about whom so incredibly much might be said, about whom nothing has ever been said yet, although they suffer and act and don't know how to help themselves.
      It is ridiculous.  Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have grown to be twenty-eight years old and of whom no one knows.  I sit here and am nothing.  And nevertheless this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up, on a grey Parisian afternoon, these thoughts:
      Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important?  Is it possible that one has had millennia of time to observe, reflect, and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip away like a recess interval at school in which one eats one's sandwich and apple?
      Yes, it is possible.
      Is it possible that despite discoveries and progress, despite culture, religion and world-wisdom, one has remained on the surface of life?  Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which might still have been something, with an incredibly uninteresting stuff which makes it look like the drawing-room furniture during summer holidays?
      Yes, it is possible.
      Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood?  Is it possible  that the past is false, because one has always spoken of its masses just as though one were telling of a coming together of many human beings, instead of speaking of the individual around whom they stood because he was a stranger and was dying?
      Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that one believed it necessary to retrieve what happened before one was born?  Is it possible that one would have to remind every individual that he or she is indeed sprung from all who have gone before, has known this therefore and should not let him or herself be persuaded by others who knew otherwise?
      Yes, it is possible.
      Is it possible that all these people know with perfect accuracy a past that has never existed?  Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is running down, unconnected with anything, like a clock in an empty room- ?
      Yes, it is possible.
      Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nevertheless live?  Is it possible that one says "women", "children", "boys", not guessing (despite all one's culture, not guessing) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
      Yes, it is possible.
      Is is possible that there are people who say "God" and mean that this is something they have in common?- Just take a couple of schoolboys: one buys a pocket knife and his companion buys another exactly like it on the same day.  And after a week they compare knives and it turns out that there is now only a very distant resemblance between the two- so different have they developed in different hands.  ("Well", says the mother of one, "if you always must wear everything out immediately-") Ah, so- Is it possible to believe one could have a God without using him?
      Yes, it is possible.
      But if all this is possible- has even no more than a semblance of possibility- then surely, for all the world's sake, something must happen.  The first comer, he who has had this disturbing thought, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even if he is just anybody, by no means the most suitable person: there is no one else at hand.  This young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down in his room five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he will have to write, that is how it will end. . .