RILKE: A REMINISCENCE
the world of the father, the world of the child, of childlike games,
of childlike guilt.There was no other guilt but that:
Und manchmal brachen Knaben aus den Bergen
der Kindheit, kamen zagen Falles nieder
und spielten mit den Dingen auf dem Grunde,
bis das Gefiille ihr Gefuhl ergriff.
...
(And sometimes boys broke from the mountains
Of childhood, came down the sides with hesitating steps
And played with things they found there at the bottom
Until they sensed the steepness of the slope.)
And thus Rilke's poetry (until the
Duino Elegies)
was a pledge of
allegiance to the realm of the Father from the realm of childhood
and of boyhood. Among his early works there is one play; but Rilke
was not a dramatist at all and later he would not have attempted a
drama even for the sake of the form. The final reason remains this:
in a drama he would somehow have had to deal with the world of
the Son, with the world of guilt, of responsibility, of freedom.
Once, when I reproached him for his leniency towards a certain
poetic work, he told me with great excitement he did not want to
criticize, he did not care. In truth, the conflict between judgment and
feeling which is so masculine, so peculiar to men, did not exist for him.
He did not understand such men at all. In Rilke's world the man re–
mained an intruder; only children, women, and old people were at
home in it. And in the world of children, women, and old people this
conflict is, after all, senseless. In the realm of the Son there is only
one who has overcome the conflict: the mystic. But Hermann von
Keyserling is right when he writes that Rilke is not in the least a
mystic.
It was the autumn of 1910 in Paris. At that time I was writing
my
Elemente der menschlichen Grosse,
in which I dared for the
first time to speak of Christ in what seemed to me to be a proper
manner. Rilke and I were together almost daily from five o'clock in
the afternoon until late at night. Once, on returning to my hotel
after talking to him about himself and his work, I wrote in my note–
book: "From fervor to greatness there is only one road: it leads
through the sacrifice." Later when Rilke read this in
Siitzen des Joghi
(Sayings of the Yogi) he wrote me: "I have copied this sentence for
myself. It is somehow for and against me."
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