Letters to Benvenuta by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

February 13, toward evening

You must know, I read no newspapers, though every day I buy two of them, that I may occasionally keep informed about exhibitions and the tireless foreign literary life. There is also another reason, for were I suddenly to cease calling for my two journals, the newsstand woman, rather than surmising that I had suddenly lost all interest in current doings, would be persuaded that her Figaro was not late enough for me and insist that I was buying it elsewhere. (Is not, I sometimes ask myself, love wrongly lived the reason why, even in the most superficial human affairs, the very act of cessation is in such bad odor, as though, of rights, it should never occur?) As for the times—our own—one should keep one’s eye on them, quite true; well, even though I scarcely read about them, I do see on occasion what goes on and wonder to myself …

In yesterday’s Figaro there was a prominent article entitled De l’amour and signed “Foemina,” which is to say, Madame Bulteau. I read Madame Bulteau occasionally, and if I muster the necessary resolve, it has to do with the fact that Mme. B. was the best friend of the late Countess de la Beaume, and that this Mme. de la Beaume left two rather strange books that strike a note of great intensity (the second surprised even those who had been close to this unusual and modest woman). It is for the sake of these striking books by another woman that I occasionally read Madame Bulteau who, on her part, is quite accomplished (you can see how everything with me arises cunningly and surreptitiously—are you beginning to feel uneasy?). So I began to read De l’amour too, yesterday, but did not get very far. What is this curious mixture of virtuosity and incapacity they call by that name here (and cannot mention often enough)? On the one hand the most exquisite skill, on the other everlasting frustration. Do you know what I felt like?—leafing through Plato’s Symposium for the first time in a long while. When I first read it, I dwelt alone in Rome in a tiny house deep in an ancient park (the same house where I began Brigge, as yet unaware of what was to become of it). My friend, I grasped one thing then, predisposed as I may have been—there is no beauty in Eros; and when Socrates said so and in his cautious way waited for his younger and more volatile conversational antagonist to block all other paths, one by one, leaving but the one way open—that Eros is not beautiful—Socrates himself then walking that path toward his god, serene and pure in heart—how then my innermost nature took fire that Eros could not be fair! I saw him just as Socrates had invoked him, lean and hard and always a little out of breath, sleepless, troubled day and night about the two between whom he trod, to and fro, hither and yon, ceaselessly accosted by both: yes, that was Eros.

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