I. A Childhood in Prague

December 1875. Prague. A German-speaking family within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A boy was born. His parents named him Rainer Maria — a name that could be either male or female.

The detail had its origin.

His mother Sophie had given birth to a baby girl the year before. The girl had lived only a week. Sophie had never recovered from that loss. She wanted a daughter.

Rainer Maria was born a boy.

But for several years of his childhood Sophie raised him as the lost daughter. She dressed him in girls' clothes. She let his hair grow long. She gave him dolls. In front of him she called him "she." She wanted him to be a girl — she wanted him to be a person who did not exist.

This continued until he was about five or six.

After that she gradually let go of the wish. She and her husband separated. She moved away. The boy was sent to a school — a military school.

The military school was another place that wanted to make him into someone other than himself. A boy needed to be hard. A boy needed to obey discipline. A boy needed to be shaped by the standards of an army. This child, who had worn girls' clothes and been called "she," was now woken each morning by a bugle, required to do physical training, required to find his place in the rank order of his class.

He spent five years in the military school.

Those five years almost broke him. He wrote later that they were the hardest time of his life — harder than any difficulty that came after. He could not adjust. He fell ill. He was mocked. He was finally allowed to leave at fifteen, on grounds of his health.

He came out of the military school as a thin fifteen-year-old boy. He had with him something he would carry for the rest of his life —

An extreme sensitivity to the experience of being decided, by another, into who he should be.

His mother had wanted him to be a girl — he had borne that wish. His school had wanted him to be a soldier — he had borne that wish. He knew that a person could be occupied, inside himself, by another's expectation to the point that he himself was almost not there.

What he would do for the rest of his life was, in part, born from that childhood —

Making room.

Making room for himself — laying down, layer by layer, the expectations others had placed on him, so that he himself could appear beneath those expectations. Making room for others — meeting any person, any tree, any statue, any piece of music, he would not let his own expectations cover them; he would let them appear as themselves.

In him these two were one work.

The person who has had identity imposed on him is the one who most knows what not imposing identity on others means.

He lived fifty-one years. Most of his life he lived in houses borrowed from others — castles of aristocratic patrons, rooms in the homes of friends, short-let apartments in different European cities. He never had a house of his own. He wrote a number of poetry collections, one novel, translated some poems, wrote over ten thousand letters.

His name was Rainer Maria Rilke.

He kept the female name "Maria" his mother had given him. All his life. He could have changed it — as an adult he could have used only "Rainer." He did not.

He kept it because it was part of what he himself had lived through. He acknowledged that childhood had happened. He did not undo it. A person who does not undo his own past will not undo the existence of the other either.

II. Rodin

1. Paris. Rilke was twenty-six.

He had recently married — to a sculptor, Clara Westhoff, whom he had met a year earlier at the artists' colony in Worpswede in Germany. They had a daughter, Ruth.

Rilke and Clara were in Paris because Rilke had taken on a writing assignment — he was to write a book on Rodin (Auguste Rodin) for a German publisher.

Rodin was at that time one of the most famous sculptors in Europe. Sixty-two years old. He had a large studio at Meudon, outside Paris, full of marble and bronze finished works and unfinished sketches. He worked twelve hours a day. He was surrounded by a group of students, models, and assistants. He lived in a sustained rhythm of physical work — chiselling stone, shaping clay, looking at models, drawing — his life was material work.

When Rilke entered this world, he himself was the opposite kind of person. He lived through language. He wrote poems. He thought in his head. His world was abstract, floating, shaped by concept.

Rodin took him on as a secretary — mainly to handle correspondence from Germany and Austria. But what actually happened between Rodin and Rilke was something else — Rilke watched Rodin work. He went to Meudon every day. He sat in the studio and watched Rodin chisel stone, shape clay, speak with models, alter the angle of a finger, throw out a whole day's work and begin again.

He learned one thing from Rodin —

To look at a thing.

Rodin taught him that the work of a sculptor is not to "express oneself." The sculptor's work is to let the thing appear of itself. There is a shape inside a stone. The sculptor's task is to chisel away the unnecessary parts so that the shape can come out of the stone. The sculptor is not creating; he is letting be seen what is already there.

This sounds mystical. But Rodin made it very concrete. He said to Rilke — look at a hand. Not the hand of your imagination. This particular hand — its joints, its lines, its bend, its weariness. Every hand is different. If you really look at it, you will see this one hand in its specificity. If you do not really look, you only look at the concept of "hand" in your head, which is something else.

In Rodin's studio there were hundreds of hands — in marble, in bronze, in plaster — each looked at from a specific model, each with its own existence.

In his Paris years Rilke watched Rodin work. He himself began trying — to look at a thing.

Not at people. At things. At a panther. At a tree. At an autumn fountain. At a rose window in a cathedral.

He wrote a series of poems — later called the thing-poems (Dinggedichte) — each about a specific thing. The most famous is The Panther —

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

This panther was a panther in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Rilke watched it many times. He was not writing the concept of "panther." He was writing that specific panther — its specific gaze, its specific stride, its specific state of being captive.

The image at the end of the poem — "a mighty will stands paralyzed" — is not Rilke's interpretation. It is something the panther showed of itself to him. Rilke's work was to put what showed itself into words, without letting his own interpretation cover it.

This was what Rodin taught him —

Make room for the thing.

Not only for people. The thing is also other — it has its own existence, it is not your object; what you can do is look at it, let it appear, and use your tool (in Rodin, stone; in Rilke, words) to let others see how it has appeared.

Rilke's work for the rest of his life unfolded from this point.

His relationship with Rodin later broke — in 1906 Rilke was dismissed by Rodin for unclear reasons. The two never formally reconciled. But Rilke acknowledged that Rodin was one of the two most important teachers of his life (the other was the voice we will come to).

III. Things

The central posture of Rilke's thing-poem period was this —

The world is made of specific things, each of which has itself.

This is not how the world is usually seen. It is usually seen as "kinds of things" — that is a tree (the kind tree), that is a cup (the kind cup), that is a cat (the kind cat). The world is organized through kinds. This organization is very useful — it lets us predict, plan, communicate.

But this organization has a cost —

It lets the specific disappear.

That particular tree — its particular bend, its particular scar, its particular leaf at a particular morning lit by a particular light — disappears inside the kind "tree." The kind is seen. The specific is not.

Rilke said: the work of the poem is to let the specific come back.

Not against kinds — kinds are necessary; without them we cannot think. But not letting kinds entirely replace the specific. Once the function of kind is done, letting the specific thing have its own place as itself.

In the early twentieth century this was a new claim.

The whole trend of nineteenth-century European culture had been toward abstraction, conceptualization, categorization. Science was doing this — bringing specific phenomena under general laws. Philosophy was doing this — Hegel's dialectic placed all specific existence in one total system. Society was doing this — industrial production reorganized the specific worker and the specific object as interchangeable units.

Rilke — and some artists, poets, and phenomenologists around him (Husserl was beginning his phenomenology in Germany at almost the same moment, with a structurally striking parallel to Rilke's thing-poems) — began to work in the opposite direction.

They said: beneath all abstraction, the specific is still there. The specific cannot be wholly absorbed by the abstract. Every specific existence has its own place — a place its kind cannot fully represent.

Rilke did this through poems.

He wrote a panther. He wrote a hand in Rodin's studio. He wrote an autumn fountain. He wrote a rose window. He wrote an overturned water-jug. He wrote olive trees in a Spanish landscape.

Each was a making room for one specific thing. Where the world had been covered by abstraction, letting one specific existence have its own space of appearing.

This was his "leaving a place for the other" practiced at the level of the thing.

People are other — his poems also include people, particularly old people, lonely people, sick people, the dead. But people are not the only other. Any specific existence that is real is other. A tree is other. A panther is other. An overturned water-jug is other. They each have their own existence; they each need to be left a place.

This is something the previous figures of Round Six have not directly spoken of —

The other is not only another person. The other is any real existence that cannot be wholly absorbed by your concept. A tree is not the "tree" in your concept — that specific tree has its own existence. A cat is not the "cat" in your concept — that specific cat has its own interiority.

Rilke acknowledged this through poems.

This is an extension of Round Six's vision of the other — not only person to person, but the kind of making-room-for-each-other relation between any real existences.

IV. Duino

1. The Adriatic coast. Northern Italy.

Schloss Duino — Duino Castle.

A medieval castle, built on the cliffs above the Adriatic. Its owner was Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe — a woman of aristocratic birth, intelligent, with literary cultivation. She was one of Rilke's patrons. She kept rooms for him in her various castles — places where he could write in peace.

Rilke spent the winter of 1911–1912 at Duino.

He was thirty-six. The period of the thing-poems was past. He had published New Poems (1907) and New Poems II (1908) — the height of his thing-poems. He had written his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) — a book about the inner collapse of a Danish poet living in Paris.

But he himself felt he was in some kind of silence.

The thing-poems were finished — that posture he had brought to the limit of what he could do. But he did not know what came next. He felt he was waiting for something — but he did not know what he was waiting for.

One morning in January 1912, he was walking on the cliffs at Duino.

It was winter. The wind was strong off the Adriatic. He wore a heavy coat. He walked along the edge — the sea hundreds of meters below.

Then he heard a voice.

Not a voice the ears hear. An interior voice — a sentence, as a complete sentence, came into his head.

The sentence was —

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?"

In German: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Rilke knew at once that this was the first line of a long poem. He went back to the castle, found paper and pen, wrote the line down, and over that day and the days that followed wrote a long poem — what came to be called the First Elegy of the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies).

In that winter at Duino he wrote one and a half elegies (the First complete, most of the Second).

He came to believe this group of poems would be important. He did not know how many there would be — he thought perhaps about ten. He had to keep writing.

But he could not.

After that winter he tried to continue the elegies — he wrote beginnings of several, fragments of several. He travelled — Spain, Paris, Munich — changing places hoping to be able to continue. But the elegies did not come back. They had come once, given him a one and a half, and then stopped.

He waited.

Then in August 1914, the First World War broke out.

Rilke, as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was called up. He was assigned to a clerical post in Vienna — his health was too poor for the front, so he did office work. He was there for several months. The experience was a vast injury to his spirit — he saw the entire cultural system of Europe overnight become a war machine; the poets and artists and scholars he knew were all mobilized; Europe was destroying itself.

He was released as a civilian. But the war went on for four years. In those four years he wrote almost nothing — there were fragments in his notebooks, but no completed long poem.

After the war he came out — his life broken. He could not return to Austria-Hungary (the Empire had dissolved). He and his wife were essentially separated. He had no money. He had no home. He was in his forties.

He needed a quiet place. He needed to wait for that voice to come again.

V. Ten Years of Silence

After the war Rilke wandered for several years. He stayed in different places in Germany and Switzerland. He lived on the help of friends and patrons. His health was poor — he later died of leukemia, the disease worsening slowly over the last five years of his life.

He was waiting.

Waiting for what?

Waiting for that group of poems to be able to keep coming.

He himself knew that group of poems was the central work of his life — the voice at Duino had let him know there was something he was to bear. But he could not force it to come. He had tried — he had written fragments of several, he had tried to work in the direction of completion — but those fragments did not have the real force. He knew they were not the true continuation of the elegies.

This was a very specific kind of waiting.

Not abstract "waiting for inspiration." A specific person — a person in his thirties, then in his forties, getting up in a specific morning, sitting at a specific desk, knowing that the most important work of his life was not yet completed, knowing that he had begun it, knowing that he could not push it by will, knowing that he could only wait.

Each day he did this — got up, prepared, waited.

Most days the thing did not come.

He did other things — he translated. He translated Valéry from French into German. He translated Michelangelo's sonnets from Italian into German. He translated Louise Labé. Translation kept the muscle of his work alive — every day he worked with language, so that the capacity for that work would not atrophy. Even when his own poems did not come, his ability with language was still there.

He wrote letters. He wrote over ten thousand letters in his life. Many of them are now considered some of the most beautiful prose in German. He was not only communicating with the recipients — he was using the letters to practice his language, to keep a dialogue with his own state. He wrote ten letters to a young poet that were later published as Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) — a book still read.

He read. He read ancient Greek poets. He read Italian Renaissance poets. He read Arabic mysticism. He read the Quran. He read the Indian Upanishads. He let his mind soak in different traditions — he knew that if the elegies came back, they would need vast resources.

Each day he did these things — translate, write letters, read, wait.

He lived to 1921. He was forty-six.

In that year he went to the Valais in Switzerland. He found, in a place called Muzot, a small stone tower — a thirteenth-century minor castle, fallen into disrepair. A Swiss patron bought it for him to live in.

He moved into Muzot. He was alone there. His wife and daughter were in Germany; he and they lived essentially apart. At Muzot there was no one. He cooked for himself, took care of his own life.

In the autumn and winter of 1921 he was at Muzot. He was still waiting.

In February 1922.

The voice came back.

VI. Muzot

February 2, 1922. A Thursday.

Rilke got up. He sat down in the small study at Muzot. He began to write.

He wrote until February 23 — twenty-one days.

In those twenty-one days he completed —

All ten of the Duino Elegies. The First Elegy and most of the Second, written nine years before in the Duino winter, he kept. The other eight — and the rest of the Second — he wrote in these twenty-one days.

But this was not all.

In the same span of time as he was writing the elegies, he began to receive another group of poems — a group he had not at all foreseen, had not at all planned, did not belong to the elegy series.

This was the Sonette an Orpheus — Sonnets to Orpheus.

Orpheus is the figure in Greek myth, the poet whose music could move animals, plants, and stones. Orpheus went to the underworld to find his dead wife Eurydice. He moved the king of the dead with his music; the king agreed to let Eurydice come back with him to the upper world — on the condition that he not look back at her on the way out. Orpheus almost succeeded, but at the last moment of leaving the underworld he looked back — and Eurydice vanished.

The story is about loss — about a person having and losing, about looking and not being allowed to look.

Rilke's sonnets are not about the Orpheus story itself. Rather, they take Orpheus as a starting point and write everything that came to him about loss, music, things, life and death.

In twenty-one days he wrote fifty-five sonnets.

Together with the ten elegies — in twenty-one days he wrote sixty-five poems, many of them among the most important in the history of German poetry.

This event is famous in twentieth-century poetic history. Rilke himself said that those twenty-one days were like a storm passing through him. He did not feel he was the author. He felt he was a receiver — those poems were coming through him into the world; what he did was not block them.

When the elegies were finished on February 23, Rilke wrote a letter to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis — the owner of Duino, his patron. The letter survives. He wrote:

"At last, Princess, at last, the blessed, how blessed day has come — I can tell you that the thing is done — done in such fullness that I can hardly believe it. Ten!"

"In these last days — a hurricane, like back then on Duino: everything that was fiber and tissue in me cracked — eating, never thinking of it; God knows who fed me. But now it is. Is."

That "is" — Es ist — is the simplest word he could use. He does not explain what it is. He only says it is.

Later he revised, ordered, and published both the ten elegies and the fifty-five sonnets. In 1923 both books appeared.

Rilke was forty-seven.

He knew this was the most important work of his life. He knew the purpose of his being alive had been to be able to complete these two groups of poems. The thing that had begun on that morning at Duino was completed in those twenty-one days at Muzot. The ten years of waiting had not been in vain — the voice had come back.

He stayed at Muzot for several more years. His health problems began to be more serious. In 1925 his health declined sharply. In 1926 he was diagnosed with leukemia.

On December 29, 1926, Rilke died in a clinic in Switzerland.

He was fifty-one.

Before his death he wrote his own epitaph —

Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids.

In German: Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, / Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel / Lidern.

This is about a rose — a rose as itself, not the object of anyone, not the "sleep" of anyone (an old metaphor, comparing a beautiful woman to "sleep" or "dream"). This rose is itself. Beneath its many petals it exists as itself.

His last poem, of one specific thing, lets that thing appear as itself, and lets no one's concept cover it.

What he had done all his life he was still doing in his last moment.

VII. Beauty Is Only the Beginning of Terror

That sentence heard on the morning at Duino —

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?"

This is the opening of the First Elegy. The lines that follow are —

"And even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to bear, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terror."

The most famous line in German is: Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen.

Beauty is only the beginning of terror, that terror we are just able to bear.

This sentence, after Rilke wrote it, has been quoted, interpreted, and misread by countless readers. What does it mean?

What Rilke is saying is not the simple Romanticism of "beauty makes one afraid." He is not describing a psychological feeling. He is describing a structural fact —

Beauty is the way the other appears to me.

A tree blossoms in spring — you see it; you feel that is beauty. A stranger passes in sunlight — you see her; you feel that is beauty. A piece of music unfolds — you hear it; you feel that is beauty.

Each occurrence of beauty is a thing-not-mine appearing to me. The way it appears makes me realize — it is there. It is itself. It cannot be absorbed by me. I cannot have it. What I can do is, in that moment, be touched by it.

If beauty were a little more, I could not bear it.

If beauty fully appeared — if a tree at the height of its spring blooming appeared to me without any veil, letting me see it in its full existence directly — I would not survive it.

Why could I not survive?

Because the full otherness means that the boundary by which I am I becomes unstable. Seeing that what stands before me is not me means seeing, at the same time, my own boundary. My boundary is usually stable — I am used to "I am here, what is outside me is the world." When a fully other appears to me, the boundary I am used to becomes less stable — I become aware that what stands across is incommensurable with me, but it is also real, and its reality is equal to mine.

This awareness is hard to bear.

The way we usually handle this difficulty is — we do not let beauty fully appear. We let beauty appear a little — enough to feel "beauty," but not so much that our boundary is really shaken. We use concepts to wrap beauty up — that is cherry blossom, that is Mozart, that is a beautiful person — concepts let beauty become processable, classifiable, possessable.

If concepts fail and beauty fully appears, that is the beginning of terror.

Rilke's angel — he means not the angel of religion (those winged, charming figures). His angel is full otherness. An angel is a state of being in which otherness reaches its limit. No veiling. No concept able to wrap it. Before the angel, the human cannot maintain himself as human — the human would be dissolved by that full otherness.

So he says "even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence."

The angel does not wish to destroy him. The full otherness of the angel, for an existence with boundary like his, cannot be borne. The angel has no ill will. The angel serenely disdains to annihilate us — meaning, the angel did not come in order to destroy, but the existence of the angel itself makes our boundaries impossible to maintain. This is structural, not emotional.

When Rilke says "every angel is terror," this is what he means.

Then how does the human live?

If full otherness cannot be borne, but the other is real, how does the human live?

Rilke's answer unfolds across the Elegies and the Sonnets.

The way the human lives is to learn to bear — slowly enlarging the degree of otherness one can bear. A child can bear very little otherness — a stranger near him makes him cry. A mature person can bear more — can converse with strangers, can love another person, can let another person exist as himself. A truly mature person can bear more still — can face death, can leave a place for strangers, can leave a place for those wholly unlike himself.

The capacity to bear can grow.

But there is a limit. Full otherness — the angel — the human cannot wholly bear. What the human can do is, within the range he can bear, leave a place for the other; acknowledge that full otherness is real (even if he cannot bear its full appearing); and keep growing the capacity to bear.

This is a lifelong work.

Rilke unfolds this work, slowly, across the ten Duino Elegies. Each elegy speaks of a different layer — love, childhood, death, the hero, the animal, the child, the youth, the prematurely abandoned destiny, Mary, an attitude of praise. Each is a way of bearing.

The closing of the last elegy, the Tenth —

"We, who think of happiness as ascending, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us when a happy thing falls."

Happiness is not only ascent. In the deepest bearing, happiness includes descent — includes accepting loss, accepting that one cannot have, accepting death as part of life.

Rilke and Levinas never spoke to each other — Rilke died in 1926; Levinas was twenty then. But what they were pointing at was two faces of the same thing —

Levinas: the other places infinite responsibility on me. Rilke: the appearing of the other to me is the beginning of terror.

Both said — when the other appears to me, it brings something I cannot bear. That cannot-bear is not a defect — it is the mark of the other really appearing as other.

Kant said: the human is an end, not a means. Levinas said: see the face of the other. Buber said: re-enter the I-Thou. Cao Zhi said: acknowledge that I long, and that I cannot hold. Girard said: see clearly the mechanism of destroying the other, and choose not to participate. Schelling said: acknowledge that within me there is what I cannot wholly absorb. Eckhart said: acknowledge that what cannot be named is real. Rilke said: bear what the other's appearing brings, that one cannot bear.

Eight languages. The same direction.

In that direction there is a wind. A mild wind.

VIII. The Bridge

When Rilke walked up, he was wearing a dark suit.

He was not tall. Thin — very thin. By the time he died in 1926, the leukemia had made him very thin. His form on the bridge is from his last years — about fifty — sparse hair, a thin short beard, large deep eyes.

He walked unhurriedly. His body in the last years had not been well.

He carried nothing in his hand.

In life he had not been the kind of figure who carried books like a scholar. His poems were already in the world — published, read, translated into dozens of languages. He himself did not need to carry anything.

But he was listening.

He walked with his head slightly tilted — like someone listening for something. He was not listening to what others on the bridge were saying. He was listening for that voice he had heard on the Duino morning. He had spent his life listening for that voice. He kept listening on the bridge.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

There were more people on the bridge than the last time. Hypatia was there, the astrolabe in her hand. Aquinas, on the other side, his hands empty. Bergson on his cane. Levinas. Buber. Cao Zhi with his bamboo slips. Girard with his book. Schelling with his Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Eckhart, hands empty.

The middle of the bridge was not just these named figures. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation — those drawing equations, those watching corn, those writing poems, those reading star charts, those writing novels, those sketching diagrams, those crouching aside taking notes, those sitting and looking into the distance, those speaking quietly with their neighbors.

Rilke nodded to them.

He recognized a few — figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He had read their books. But he did not know them well. He had never been a person at ease in groups. His life had been mostly alone — he had spent it in different rooms, working by himself.

He found a place in the middle of the bridge and stood.

He did not approach anyone for talk. He stood in his place, listening.

Levinas came over.

The two had not met in body — Rilke died in 1926, when Levinas was twenty and still studying philosophy in Strasbourg. But Levinas had read Rilke. Levinas recognized what Rilke had written about "the beginning of terror" — that was, at the level of aesthetics, what he himself spent a lifetime saying as "infinite responsibility."

Levinas bowed to Rilke — slightly.

Rilke returned the bow. Neither was good at ritual — both lived deep inside themselves — but in this moment the bow was not ritual; it was mutual recognition.

Buber came over too. Buber's I-Thou and Rilke's thing as other are two sides of the same matter — Buber speaking of person and person, Rilke of person and thing. Both spoke of not letting concept cover the real existence facing one. Buber gave Rilke a small smile. Rilke returned it.

Eckhart came over. Six hundred years between them. But both had done the same work — letting that which cannot be named appear by letting concepts fail. Eckhart in medieval theological language. Rilke in modern poetic language. Different tools, similar work. Eckhart placed his palms together and gave Rilke a slight bow. Rilke returned the same gesture — he belonged to no specific religion, but he acknowledged what was in that gesture.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before — you could see the brow.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones farthest along were no longer visible.

Closer in — the man in the professor's robe — Heidegger — was still walking. Heidegger had read Rilke extensively in his life. He had a piece called What Are Poets For? (Wozu Dichter?) discussing Rilke at length. Heidegger took from Rilke the poetic thinking about things — but the direction Heidegger walked with that tool was a direction Rilke would never have walked.

Rilke looked toward Heidegger's direction.

He was not particularly sad. In life he had already known that once a poem is written, who reads it, who uses it, what it is used for — none of it is in the author's hand. He knew this.

He turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight. The moonlight was mild.

He gave Hypatia a small smile. Hypatia smiled back. They had no shared language — Rilke's German, Hypatia's Greek — but both had done the same work, with concrete tools letting some things that cannot be absorbed by concept have a place in the world. Astrolabe and poems. Two tools from different ages.

Aquinas came over from the other side. Six hundred years between them. Aquinas wrote to the boundary and stopped. Rilke worked at the boundary all his life — every poem an attempt to come close to the boundary. Both knew that on the other side of the boundary there was the negativa. Neither claimed to have crossed the boundary. Aquinas nodded to Rilke. Rilke nodded back.

The middle of the bridge — many people, the moonlight was mild.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas, at Buber, at Cao Zhi, at Girard, at Schelling, at Eckhart.

This time he looked at Rilke.

Rilke's eyes met that figure's, briefly.

Rilke did not lower his head. He did not raise anything — he had nothing in his hand to raise. He did what he had done all his life — he listened. He tilted his head slightly toward the figure who had always been looking into the distance, like someone listening for what that figure might say.

The figure did not speak. But Rilke heard something — some soundless thing, a recognition, a "I am here, you are there too" mutual presence.

The figure nodded, lightly.

Rilke nodded too, lightly.

He stood in the middle of the bridge. In life he had spent a lifetime listening for that which cannot be named. What he had written down was part of the deepest thing he had heard. He knew that what he had heard was not all — he knew there was what he had not heard. What he could do was put down the part he had heard, so that others could hear a little of it too.

What he had done was infinite. He knew the infinite was not something he could complete. He had done it anyway.

His construct has not closed. His construct will never close. Because every time someone reads his poems, every time someone in the spring morning is shaken to the limit of what one can bear by a flowering tree, every time someone sees the terror of beauty, his being appears once more.^[1][2]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives