Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman

Letters on God

14 ✦ rainer maria rilke of my surprise over this fact, I am forced into the greatest despair and later on into a sense of dread. But even beyond such dread lies something and then something beyond that, which has such great intensity that my intuition is unable to determine whether it is burning hot or ice-cold. Years ago I tried to answer someone who had been frightened by the Malte book by saying that I, too, considered it at times like a hollow mold, like a photographic negative, whose furrows and indentations are pain, sadness, and painful acknowledgment; but that the cast of the mold, provided one could produce it (as with a bronze, the positive figure one makes from the cast), might perhaps be happiness, affirmation , the most concrete and secure blessedness. Who knows, I wonder, if we are not always entering life as if from behind the gods’ backs, separated from their radiant faces by nothing else than their own bodies, from their expressions that we so long for, to which we are so close and yet behind which we are standing. But that can only mean that our faces and the face of God are looking in the same direction, are in agreement with each other. And so, how should we ourselves then face the space that lies before God? Am I confusing you by using the word “God” and “gods” (just as with the word “spirit” or “spirits”) for the sake of inclusiveness and under the assumption that you, too, might be able to make immediate associations? Please try to accept the supernatural. Let us agree that since their earliest beginnings people have formed gods who here and there contained only what was dead and threatening, what was destructive and terrorizing, what was violence, anger, supernatural stupor, as if all equally strung together into a dense and evil knot. In short, one acknowledged the strange, if you will, saying one was aware of it, endured it, and even recognized a certain mysterious kinship and association with it: one was part of it, letters on god ✦ 15 but did not know how to deal with these experiential facets of life. They were too big, too dangerous, too complex, and they grew far beyond oneself and assumed immense importance . Apart from the many challenges of an existence geared toward utility and performance, it was impossible to carry steadily along these other circumstances too, cumbersome and incomprehensible as they were. Hence, it was agreed to occasionally bracket them out. After all, they were an extra, the most powerful, the too powerful, the enormous, the forceful , the incomprehensible, the often ominous. And when thus gathered into one place, why would and should they not make themselves felt in their influence, effect, power, superiority? But now as if from outside ourselves. Could one not see the history of God like that: as if it were that side of the human condition that was never visited, always put off, saved up for later, and eventually missed out on altogether, a side that had demanded its own time, its own decision and determination; but now that it had been exiled to another place, it produced such tension that the individual heart, continually distracted and stingily applied, could hardly withstand it? You see, that is how it was with death also. Death is experienced and yet we are not experiencing it in its true nature, ever growing taller than we are and yet never quite acknowledged by us, injuring the meaning of life and yet surpassing it from the start. Therefore, death too was exiled, pushed outside, so it would not constantly interrupt us as we were looking for life’s meaning, this death that is most likely so close to us that we are incapable of measuring its distance from our very own soul. Death became something external that was to be kept at bay daily; it lurked somewhere out there in empty space so as to attack one or the other person in a malicious, haphazard way. Suspicion mounted against death for being the adversary of all 16 ✦ rainer maria rilke adversaries, the invisible opposite out there in space, the one who brings our joys to an end, the dangerous glass of our happiness out of which we could be spilled at any moment. Both God and death were now outside, were the other, while inside was our life...