Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910 by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

[103]

To Elisabeth von der Heydt

Meudon-Val-Fleury,

Seine et Oise, France

April 26, 1906

… Do you know, does v.d. Heydt know Shaw’s works? There is a man who has a very good way of getting along with life,—of putting himself into harmony with it (which is already something). Proud of his works, like Wilde or Whistler, but without their pretentiousness, proud as a dog is proud of his master.…

[104]

To Clara Rilke

Meudon-Val-Fleury, Seine et Oise

May 3, 1906

… there is no nightingale in the garden here, not even many bird voices; on account of the hunters probably who come by here every Sunday; but sometimes in the night I waken with the calling, a calling somewhere below in the valley, calling out of a full heart. That sweet ascending voice that does not cease to mount, that is like an entire being transformed into voice, all of which—its form and bearing, its hands and face—has become voice, nocturnal, great, adjuring voice. From afar it sometimes bore the stillness to my window, and my ear took it over and drew it slowly into the room and, across my bed, into me. And yesterday I found them all, the nightingales, and in a mild, curtained night wind walked past them, no, right through the midst of them, as through a throng of singing angels that only just parted to let me through, and was closed in front of me and shut to again behind me. Thus, from quite near, I heard them. (I had been in town, to eat with passing friends of the Elberfeld von der Heydts, and came back to Val-Fleury by train toward ten.) Then I found them: in all these old, neglected parks (in the one with the beautiful house whose walls are slowly falling in, as though some artillery of time were aimed directly at them, the one that is cut through the middle by the road and like a fruit that has fallen apart shows its interior, withered and moldy;—and a little further over in a thickly wooded stretch of park) and behind and above in the closed gardens of the Orangerie. And from the other side it came across over the walls of the old Mairie and then suddenly beside me out of a dense little garden full of hedges and lilac bushes—: came so recognizably and so interwoven with the little garden lying withdrawn into itself under the half-light night, as when in a piece of lace one recognizes the picture of a bird spun of the same threads that signify flowers and blooming things and densest superfluity. And that was noise and was about me and drowned out all thoughts in me and all my blood; was like a Buddha of voices, so big and commanding and superior, so without contradiction, vibrating so, up to the very boundary of the voice, where it becomes silence again, vibrating with the same intensive fullness and evenness with which the stillness vibrates when it grows large and when we hear it.…

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