Insight from Rainer Maria Rilke
Amidst the current crises of our world – economic catastrophe with little hope that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, politics-as-usual with an extra measure of bitter, uncompromising anger, the bursting-bubbles of our excesses one after another – I’m wondering how to remain centered, at peace, standing in Light and to be growing into what is a human potential of beauty.
So, rather than focusing on the dark problems we face, I turn my attention toward a poet who, from the depths of darkness that he experienced in life, turned his eyes – and ours – toward Light.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Dec. 1875 to Dec. 1926) is considered one of the most expressive poets of the German language. The times during which he composed his poetry and prose was an age of great political, social and economic upheaval and anxiety. It was an age not unlike our own.
The most familiar of Rilke’s works in the English speaking world are the Duino Elegies, a series of 10 poems named for the Castle of Duino that stands above the Adriatic Sea near Trieste in Northern Italy. Rilke spent a lonely winter there in 1912. The Elegies are an expression of his spiritual experience in the midst of the dark times in which he found himself.
In the “Ninth Elegy,” Rilke confronts the fleeting nature of one’s life as it takes place within the context of a fleeting world. He wonders how one might experience some significant and profound meaning for a life lived in the fleeting moments that ultimately lead to death. He rejects fame or fortune or even some sense of material happiness as a reason to live. From his view of the beautiful Adriatic he concludes that:
“being here amounts to so much, because all
this Here and Now, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all.” *
As the poem unfolds, Rilke offers an understanding to the dilemma of a life lived in the fleeting moment. He writes:
“Are we, perhaps, here just for saying; House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Olive tree, Window –
possibly: Pillar, Tower? . . . . but for saying, remember
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.”
In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, in the Book of Genesis, in the 19th verse of chapter 2 God brings forth from the ground all the creatures that inhabit the world. They are brought before Adam so that God would see what the man would call them. The verse ends in this way: “and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”
There is a sense in Rilke’s poem, and in the scriptures of both Jews and Christians alike, that there is something about the reality of the world, fleeting as it is, that it becomes truly real when named. The human being, in a very real sense, only becomes fully human when participating in making the creation a conscious reality.
In this sense, we are co-creators with the Creator. The world is fleeting, as are the lives we live in the fleeting world; but our lives, and the life of the world, become real when named. We name the smallest particle of matter as well as the largest conception of the universe and both move out of darkness to stand in the light of reality. It is through the naming that we, and the world, become fully alive.
I am not sure whether we can persuade the politicians to do the right thing. I’m not even sure that we have a clue as to what the right thing might be. We all view the right thing from the perspective of self-interest. When resources become scarce our interests are in conflict. We hope that through the conflict some right thing will emerge that will satisfy us all. In the mean time, though, it’s the conflict that darkens our lives, even to the point where we believe that the darkness is light. Something beautiful is lost along the way.
Beauty is only experienced when we are mindful of it. That means that we must take the moment in which we find ourselves and be fully in it through the naming what our minds see. This means that we must capture what is fleeting before us, hold it for the moment, name it, appreciate it, and let it fill us and then let it go and set it free. We must do this to be alive, and to also prevent the conflicts of our fleeting world from destroying the life – the only life – we have.
Rilke concludes the “Ninth Elegy” with this:
“Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible
re-arising in us?
. . . .
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
are growing less . . . . Supernumerous existence
wells up in my heart.”
“Supernumerous existence” is to know eternity in the present moments of our lives. Eternal life is a quality rather than a quantity. It is ascetical rather than ethical. It is beautiful rather than practical. It is alive rather than dead, and it saves us from the dark.
We swim among sharks and we do our best to survive, but survival isn’t all. We must, even if the sharks have their way, swim up to the light, raise our heads above the darkness below and breathe deeply to know that we are alive. We will dive once again below the surface and make our way as best we can, but that moment of light and that deep and refreshing breath makes it all worthwhile.
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*All quotes from the Ninth Duino Elegy are from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leisham and Stephen Spender, W. W. Norton & Company, 1939.
