Stories of God by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393350449
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

How the Thimble Came to Be God

WHEN I stepped away from the window, the evening clouds were still there. They seemed to be waiting. Should I tell them a story too? I proposed it. But they didn’t even hear me. To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.

“We are lying over the earth,” they explained, “more exactly, over Europe. And you?”

I hesitated. “There’s a country here—”

“What does it look like?” They inquired.

“Well,” I answered, “twilight, with things—”

“Europe’s like that too,” laughed a young girl-cloud.

“Possibly,” I said, “but I have always heard that the things in Europe are dead.”

“Yes, of course!” said another cloud scornfully. “What nonsense that would be—living things!”

“All the same,” I insisted, “mine are alive. So that’s the difference. They can become various things, and one that comes into the world as a pencil or a stove, need not yet despair on that account of advancing in life. A pencil may someday turn into a staff, or, if all goes well, into a mast; and a stove at least into a city gate.”

“You seem to me to be a very simpleminded evening cloud,” said the youngster who had already expressed herself with so little reserve.

An old man-cloud feared she might have offended me. “There are all sorts of countries,” he said kindly. “I once chanced to come over a small German principality, and I’ve never to this day believed that that belonged to Europe.”

I thanked him and said: “I see it will not be easy for us to come to an understanding. Allow me, and I will simply tell you what I saw below me recently; that will probably be the best way.”

“Please do,” agreed the wise old man-cloud in the name of all the rest.

I began: “People are in a room. I am fairly high up, you must know, and so it is that to me they look like children; therefore I shall simply say: children. So then: Children are in a room. Two, five, six, seven children. It would take too long to ask them their names. Besides, they seem to be having an earnest discussion, so there’s a good chance that a name or two will be given away in the course of it. They must have been at it for some time already, for the eldest (I observe that they call him Hans) is saying in a tone of finality:

‘No it certainly cannot remain like this. I have heard that parents used always to tell their children stories in the evening—or at least on evenings when they had been good—till they went to sleep. Does anything like that happen now?’ A short pause, then Hans answered himself: ‘It doesn’t happen, anywhere. I for my part—and also because I’m fairly grown-up—would

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