PARTISAN REVIEW
Just as Rilke was not religious in any significant sense, so he
was not a man of pity nor indeed
in
any way socially disposed. Espe–
cially as to the religious element in him the prevalent notions are
quite mistaken. I admit openly that I find the idea of the "neighbor
God" unbearable. He did not love the poor for the sake of the Son
but because they stand outside the ordinary, because they are un–
burgherlike. Poverty and wealth find their meaning in each other.
In the realm of the Father. The Son has shifted their emphasis. I
can even now hear his laugh, that very large mouth's strange laugh,
which was like a reversed sucking and before which everything flew
and scattered, when I said to him-at the station in Brig where he
had accompanied me-"Rilke, I personally have certainly found a
strange confirmation of your world, your ending world: you see, I
have met so many wonderful old maids in my life and so incredibly
many foolish mothers. It really seems as though the clever virgins of
the parable had all become old maids and the foolish ones all mothers.
At the same time it is clear proof that we have been forever cast
out of the Mother world of Bachofen and Schuler."
Rilke always showed a special liking for those beings whom the
world of men calls old maids. Not so much from pity in the vague
sense of the "careless" man, but because he approached the woman
from the woman's point of view. Rilke was devoted to women as
perhaps no other man before him. That is why the so-called beautiful
woman did not exist for him. She too is a creation of the "careless"
man, the dilettante who does not penetrate at all or merely in a
"careless" manner. His love too is without the Son's greatness or has
been proven false by it. That is why only women can truly give this
kind of love. "We are spoiled by the easy enjoyment of mastery, like
all dilettantes, and we have the reputation of mastery," Rilke writes
in
The Journal of
My
Other Self.
"How would it be, though, if we
scorned our successes; what if we returned to the very beginning to
learn the work of love that has always been done for us."
It
is only because everything is love and all "greatness" lies in
love and never outside it that some things in Rilke are, perhaps deco–
ration. flourish, ornament, and play. But nothing, nothing is cliche.
Which accounts for his wonderful unity. Rilke was poet, was person–
ality even when he merely washed his hands. The only entirely dread–
ful memory of his life were the years he spent
in
the St. Polten
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