The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (31 page)

THE CENTRAL SANE HUMAN ACTIVITY

Heidegger loved the poetry of Rilke, but it was also the
way
in which Rilke was a poet that mattered to the philosopher.

“Rilke was perhaps more exclusively a poet than anyone before him or since. . . . No other German author, Goethe included, began writing as trivially and ended writing as superbly as Rilke did.” This is Wolfgang Leppmann in his biography of Rilke, and it is no small thing to say. True as these remarks may be, and as appealing as Rilke’s qualities were to Heidegger, we cannot nonetheless overlook the interesting and pertinent fact that Rilke was a much-traveled man (about Europe, at least) who knew and befriended many contemporary luminaries: Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Paul Valéry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Sergei Diaghilev. He visited Russia several times, where he met Leo Tolstoy; he spent several months in Paris, where he met and wrote about the same
saltimbanques
(traveling acrobats) that Picasso painted, and visited Auguste Rodin before writing his biography.

And then there was his affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé, a beautiful Russian-born German writer and psychoanalyst, who had famously refused Nietzsche’s proposal of marriage (Nietzsche said Wagner was the “fullest” person he ever knew, but that Lou was the “smartest”). She was the author of two novels, wrote the first biography of Nietzsche and, though married to Friedrich Carl Andreas, a lecturer in the Oriental Department at the University of Berlin, she refused to sleep with him, even on their wedding night; thereafter she took a series of lovers, always younger than herself, including Frank Wedekind, who may have used her as the prototype for Lulu, the insatiable seductress in his
Earth-Spirit
.

In his biography of the poet, Leppmann chronicles Rilke’s restless movements, year by year, showing that, from his early twenties on, he
moved residence two or three times a year, sometimes more, sometimes much more. In saying that Rilke was
exclusively
a poet, Leppmann was using license—or using the word in a very particular way. Rilke was a great letter-writer and always interested in the great issues of his day. He had many women friends and was popular among them—he was hardly a monk. Or at least, not to begin with. One of the notable transformations of Rilke’s life was that he went from being a young man-about-town, who loved the company of beautiful women, the chatter of coffeehouses and the informed busyness of newspaper editorial offices, to someone who came to appreciate solitude and remote landscapes for their own sake.

But yes, he was an exceptional poet. He had a religious upbringing, and remained slightly mystical all his life, though he lost his faith under the influence of Hegel and Nietzsche, and wanted religious instruction removed from schools. He was, says Leppmann, a “melancholy atheist, a nonbeliever with a guilty conscience.”
10
On his early trips to Russia he was impressed by the peasants (more so than Tolstoy was, who knew them better), in particular their concept of God, which he felt was much vaguer and less pretentious than the Western concept, “in everything as yet unafflicted by the schism of consciousness.”

And original observation was Rilke’s developed aim, as he matured, in both a poetic and a spiritual sense, which for him were much the same. “What lends sense to life [i.e., the poet’s life] is not transitory happiness but the acts of ‘saying,’” Rilke stated, “of internalizing and transforming into language all that is in danger of being made superfluous by a functional, machine-run civilization: ‘What is it you urgently ask for if not transformation? Earth, my love, I will do it.’”
11
Rilke saw it as his self-imposed task in life to remove that schism between humans and nature that for him was the major crime of Christianity, because Jesus had created a kind of consciousness that has stopped us from experiencing the earth as fully as we might, and it is the recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life.” This was the idea of “surrender” to nature, which Heidegger echoed in
Being and Time
.

Rilke’s attempts to do this, his “religion of aesthetic contemplation,” as Michael Hamburger puts it, are revealed most clearly and most successfully in his major later works, in particular the
Sonnets to Orpheus
(1922) and the
Duino Elegies
(1923).
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In a sense, what he was trying to do in
poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past that hinder a true appreciation of what the earth—which is all there is—has to offer. As part of this Rilke saw himself as a “receiver” of his poems, rather than as their creator.

All prose talk of incandescent poetry such as Rilke’s is bound to interfere with the experience, but we have to try. His most successful lines play with images of the earth—the natural world—sewn seamlessly into our psychology, as when in the sonnet “The Passing” he speaks of “the boundless inner sky,” or when, improbably but ambitiously, he brings the latest hard science to bear on intimate life:

From star to star—such distances; and yet

Those encountered here are harder reckoned.

Someone—a child, say, and then a second . . .

What dark matter holds them separate?

As that last line shows, Rilke could ask the most amazing questions, using them to locate all his spiritual wonder in the life we lead now. As Don Paterson argues in his examination of the sonnet sequence, Rilke refutes the two principal religious errors. “The first is to think of truth as being in the possession of an inscrutable third party, whose knowledge and intentions can only be divined.” In fact, he says, the only thinking being done “in this part of the universe” is by us; which means that “truth” is not determined, but provisionally
decided
, in the manner of science. “The Sonnets insist on sheer wondering enquiry as
the
central sane human activity, a way of configuring our most honest prepositional stance towards the universe.”
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O happy Earth, O Earth on holiday,

play with your children! Let us try

to catch you . . .

“The second error is to think of any afterlife or any reincarnation we are bound for as more extraordinary than finding ourselves here in the
first place.” By projecting ourselves into some future state, beyond our death, Rilke believed that we warp our behavior in
this
life, and weaken our responsibility to the here and now, as well as our negotiations with those with whom we share the planet. Religion, Rilke thought, acted as though it held a copyright on the miraculous. But being here, he said,

is a source

with a thousand well

heads; a net of pure force

that no one can touch and not kneel down in awe.

He argued that “we shouldn’t know what to do with the consolation offered by a God”; for the most divine consolation “inheres” in the human itself: “our eye would have to grow just a little more seeing, our ear more receptive, the flavor of fruit would have to come home to us more completely, we should be able to bear more smell, and have more presence of mind” so as to derive more convincing consolations from our most immediate experiences.

Rilke thought that humans were probably unique among mammals in that they have conscious foreknowledge of their own death. And it is this end that imposes on us the idea of a narrative to a life, a narrative that has or will have meaning, a meaning that—because it comes to an end (and we know it, in advance)—has an overall shape: death drives the plot of life. It is this predicament that has to be overcome. It is a recognition that consciousness is, as some philosophers have described it, “a crime against nature.”

This dual—or riven—state, this predicament, could best be dealt with—accommodated, enjoyed—by
singing
. Singing, Rilke said, is unique to humans. To sing as a human is not to sing as a bird; as birds sing, so humans talk. “Music [in a song] weaves a line through the discontinuous present . . . lyric unites the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds. By continually returning us to the previous moment, the lyre cheats that time which carries us to our deaths. . . . The endless river rolls on, but through song we can row against the current and arrest, for a little while, our own progress.”
14

For Rilke, singing has another meaning too. Singing is what the earth
itself does and this meant that “saying” and “singing” overlapped. A good example here is the Tenth Elegy with its concept of “Pain City,” in which a young man follows a beckoning girl across the meadows. She is not just a girl, though, but an allegory—she is a young Lament, who soon passes him on to an older one, who explains: “We were once a great race, we Laments.” She leads the man across a “landscape of mourning,” in which emotions have coalesced into geological and biological phenomena—here there is a “polished lump of primeval pain,” there a “petrified slag of anger,” elsewhere “fields of sadness in bloom” and “herds of grief.” These are attempts to reconfigure the earth, to wonder at it and enjoy it in new ways, to surround ourselves with new experiences, new metaphors for expressing emotions, to realize “unconceived spaces.”

In wonder we have to wrest from the earth its ways of singing; Rilke’s way was by naming new ways of seeing, new concepts, new juxtapositions, to suggest new ways of being. It was also a way to overcome what he felt was the illusory idea of a unitary self; he was convinced that the way to understand “being” was “as a flow,” rather than something static and unchanging.
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SHORTCUTS TO LIFE

He was also forever on the lookout for metaphors that provided shortcuts, as in his poem about a fig tree. Significantly, this tree goes straight to the fruit state without blossoming. Rilke is asking here whether we have to accept the familiar botanical metaphor in our own lives: blossoming may be a beautiful process and a lovely word, but isn’t it at root an unproductive, ephemeral waiting period and in that sense a waste of time, the very opposite of a shortcut? Elsewhere he asks whether some people are “
Ganze geborne
,” “born into the whole,” born with the knowledge of the total unity of experience. Is that where poetry comes from?

And all this led Rilke to argue that death ought to be the logical culmination of life, “not something invading it with hostile step.”
16
Here he introduced his powerful image of a glass that shatters while it is ringing, that destroys itself by and in its own intensity, a poetic journey to nothingness.
17
To this he added his concept of death as “uniquely one’s own.”

For we are only leaf and skin,

The mighty death which each one bears within,

That is the core around which all revolves.

A “mighty death,” an individual death (not just a slinking-away in what he called a “ready-made” death), after a lifetime’s singing about the earth in new ways, approximates the rules of existence that Rilke sought. Aspire to make your death an event of consequence.

He died as a poet, Leppmann says, because “even in the face of death his own imagination was more important and more real to him than reality. . . . Just as he had closed himself off from whole areas of life—career, wealth, marriage—for the sake of the inner world that informed his poetry, so too did he refuse to acknowledge his imminent end.” According to his doctor, although he was in considerable pain he chose to get by without resorting to painkillers, and he never asked about the disease that he suffered from.
18
A mighty death indeed.
I

“TWO WAYS OF BEING IN THE WORLD”

Despite its length, Robert Musil’s three-volume unfinished
The Man without Qualities
does not take such a radical form as some other modernist novels, such as Kafka’s
The Castle
, Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
, Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves
or James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
; but it did have, like some of those other works, a direct relationship with the author’s life.

Musil was born in Klagenfurt in Austria in 1880. His father was an engineer from an old aristocratic family and he was himself ennobled in 1917, barely a year before the Austrian nobility was abolished. His family had hoped that Robert would embrace a military career, but despite serving with distinction in the war he chose to attend various technical universities, where he did a doctoral thesis on philosophy, natural science and mathematics, and wrote a treatise on the physicist and philosopher Ernst
Mach. Early on he had a fascination with science, with what he called the “sacred aura of exactness,” the “sobriety” of its techniques and the lack of illusion in scientific inquiry. But this enthusiasm passed: the routine nature of much experimentation, and the difference he observed between the professional and personal lives of the engineers and technicians—the way they failed to uphold at home the standards they employed at work—disillusioned him, and he turned to writing. At various times he was editor of the literary magazine
Die Neue Rundschau
and a theatre critic, and he won both the Kleist Prize and the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize for his play
Die Schwärmer
, about a professor of psychology who becomes disillusioned with both his marriage and his scientific study.

During the 1920s, Musil began
The Man without Qualities
, and worked on it almost daily. Like George Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf, he believed that the novel was the mode appropriate to the philosophical situation of his generation and that it embodied “that terrible wonder in the face of an irrational world.” Novels—his novel, anyway—were a kind of thought experiment, on par with Einstein’s or Picasso’s, where a figure might be seen in profile and in full face at the same time. J. M. Coetzee has described
The Man without Qualities
“as a book overtaken by history during its writing.” This is surely true in one sense, at least: after the first three parts were published, in 1930 and 1933, Musil, whose wife, Martha, was Jewish, was forced into exile in Switzerland. He memorably described Hitler as “the living unknown soldier.”