RILKE: A REMINISCENCE
a little ridiculous as they grow old. They become distorted through
too much or too little experience, through the loneliness of experience.
Because there arises a break between existing-the existing of child–
hood-and experience. Rilke's asceticism was not that of the spiritual
world; his asceticism, too, was rooted in pleasure. That is what I call
soul, Father world, Mother world. Many years ago he had developed
the habit of going barefoot. Over long periods. What delighted
him
was the fact that by touching the earth with
his
naked soles he had
developed, so to speak, a new sense in them. Or so he told me.
As
a child Rilke grew up among eccentrics. In the old Austria,
which has produced more
types
than any other country of Europe.
In Prague, where the eccentric is endemic. When I visited him for
the last time-1923-in Muzot, I asked him urgently to record his
childhood reminiscences. We will soon have at our disposal an ex–
ceedingly great number of the very beautiful letters which he be–
stowed upon his friends (for many years his entire work consisted of
the writing of such letters). I fear, however, that his childhood
reminiscences were never recorded. During his last years he was pre–
occupied with his French poems or rather with the fact that he was
now writing poetry in French. I remember a wonderful story from
his
childhood and I will tell it here as well as I can. His friends will
know immediately what he, the incomparable storyteller among the
many whom I have known, would make of something like this. In
Prague there lived an elderly uncle of his, a bachelor. He had a
single passion, a tic of the soul: birds. He filled a whole room with
them. On a certain day of the week Rilke was allowed to visit the
uncle. For lunch. Together with a little girl cousin. The uncle came
from the bird room which was next to the dining room. Feathers
stuck in his hair, in his beard; his suit was covered with them. No
one else was allowed to enter the bird room. Whenever the uncle
got up during the meal to bring the birds a small bone or a piece of
fruit, the singing, calling, and screeching of many, many birds could
be heard through the opened door. But one day all this was over. No
more cages, no singing and screeching, no more feathers in the uncle's
beard and hair. Instead of the birds, a red-haired, freckled, colorfully
dressed person with a loud voice. All those many birds, whom no one
had ever seen, had transformed themselves into this woman who
from then on never left the uncle and who finally buried
him.
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