Letters to a Young Poet Read Free Page B

recognize. In puzzling over that question I have found it helpful to think of words like ‘purity’, ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’ as placeholders pointing towards all that does not yet exist, but might. They are abstractions of the kind that allow the mind to work with the unknown and the not-yet-real. They correspond to things like surds, irrational numbers and infinitesimals in mathematics, that is to say, to ‘numbers’ that cannot be expressed in ordinary, finite terms. Albert Einstein once wrote that ‘as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’ No one would say that mathematicianswho work with surds or with the kind of axioms Einstein called ‘free creations of the human mind’ are involved in grandiose responses to their own neuroses. No, they are just doing mathematics. Nor are their unreal placeholders entirely divorced from real experience. Most of modern technology, from suspension bridges to airplanes, would not exist if Newton and Leibnitz had not entertained the idea of infinitesimals.
    Let us suppose that the pure, unreal elements of Rilke’s world perform a similar function, albeit in this case a spiritual or aesthetic one. In a 1903 letter, he wrote that an art object must be ‘withdrawn from all chance … lifted out of time and given to space …’ where it will become ‘lasting, capable of eternity’. I cannot be sure what ‘eternity’ means here, but at the same time I cannot be sure that it has no meaning. In
The Letter from the Young Worker
, included at the end of this volume, the character Rilke has created recalls the iconography of the old churches: ‘Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and … their unreality makes him more real for me.’ Here on earth it may be hard to find some of the things that Rilke mentionsin the letters to Kappus – ‘an infinitely tender hand’, for example, or an ‘infinitely solitary’ work of art – but that does not mean the phrases have no function. Perhaps they lead us towards the outer edges of finite hands and finite works of art and, from there, towards imagining what lies beyond, what has not yet come to be. As the Young Worker says:
Isn’t our relationship to all the great unknown forces exactly like this? We experience none of them in their purity … But isn’t it the case with all scholars, explorers and inventors that the assumption that they were dealing with great forces suddenly led to the greatest of all?
    In the letters that Rilke wrote to his friends and family during the years that he was writing to Kappus, he rarely mentions that parallel correspondence. An interesting exception is a letter of July 1904 to his wife Clara. She has forwarded one of Kappus’s letters and Rilke remarks that the younger man ‘is having a hard time’, that he complains of having used up his strength. Rilke then, in a typical inversion, remarks that ‘the using up of strength isin a certain sense still an increase of strength …: all the strength we give away comes back over us again, experienced and transformed. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there that, truly done, would not be prayer?’
    Rilke is speaking of Kappus’s struggles of course, but he could as easily be speaking of his own. After all, in the letters to Kappus he offers up the strength he himself had by then acquired, and gives it away such that it might come back transformed. Of note, then, is the way his thoughts turn from donation to prayer, as if to say that a letter, ‘truly done’, is itself a form of invocation. That, in any event, is how I have come to understand the otherwise exaggerated language of these letters. It is surely the case that, from Kappus’s position, the letters are hortatory and sermonizing. But to the degree that Rilke is speaking of and to himself – rehearsing his own