The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke [Rilke, Rainer Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141182216
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

[39] Now even the tapestries of the Dame à la licorne are no longer in the old château of Boussac. The time has come when everything is being removed from the houses; they are not allowed to keep anything any more. Times of danger are safer now than times of safety. No member of the Delle Viste family walks at your side and has it all in his blood. They have all passed on. No one speaks your name, Pierre d'Aubusson, great grand master from an ancient house,28 at whose behest it may have been that these images were woven that exalt all things and divulge none. (Ah, to think that poets should ever have written differently of women, more literally, or so they thought. It is certain that this was all we were meant to know.) Now one merely happens to stand before them, among others who merely happen to be there, and one is almost alarmed to be there uninvited. But there are others present, though never many, and they move on. Young people barely spare a moment, unless to have seen these things once, to have studied this or that characteristic they possess, is a requirement of their subject.

You do find young girls before them on occasion, though. In the museums there are a good many young girls who have left those houses, somewhere or other, those houses that can keep nothing any more. They find themselves before these tapestries and forget themselves for a while. They always had a feeling that it existed, this kind of soft life of slow and never wholly elucidated gestures, and they darkly remember that for a time they even imagined that life would be their own. But then they hurriedly take out a sketchbook and begin to draw, anything at all, one of the flowers or a small, contented animal. It does not matter what it is, someone has told them. And it really does not matter. The main thing is simply to draw; for that was why they left home one day, rather impetuously. They are of good family. But when they raise their arms as they are drawing, it turns out that their dress has not been buttoned up at the back, or not completely. There are one or two buttons that they cannot reach. For when the dress was made, there was not yet any talk of their going away, suddenly, on their own. At home in the family there is always someone who will help with such buttons. But here, dear God, who will bother with such things in such a big city? The thing would be to have a girl friend; but girl friends are in the same situation, and they would end up fastening each other's dresses. That would be ridiculous, and would remind them of their families, which they do not want to be reminded of.

It is unavoidable that at times, while they are sketching, they wonder whether it would not have been possible to stay at home after all.

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