RAINER MARIA RILKE

anastomosis knower and known interfuse and are one. Rilke
came finally to believe that he had achieved a large measure of
this transformation, and could write : “Very seldom now, and
as if inadvertently, does a Thing address me vouchsafingly and
givingly, without an equivalent and significant demand being
called out in my.elf.” Of the Spanish landscape—“the last that
I boundlessly experienced”—he said that “everywhere appear-
ance and vision came, as it were, together in the object, there
was in each one a whole inner world revealed, as though an angel
who encloses space were blind and gazing into himself” (Letters
1914-1921, p. 80). So art, which began by exploring Nature in
search of an object to “gaze” upon, ends in rejection of the
physical world : “I believe no one has experienced more dis-
tinctly the extent to which art goes against Nature, it is the most
passionate inversion of the world, the road back from the
Infinite, on which we meet all true Things, now we see them in
their wholeness, their face draws near, their motion attains
individuality— : yes, but who are we that we may tread this
road, that we may take this direction in the face of them all,
this everlasting turning round by which we deceive them, letting
them think we had already arrived somewhere at some goal, and
now had leisure to come back:” (Letters 1907-1914, p. 111).
The closing note of humility is characteristic.

NoOTE 17, PAGE 29

Just as Kierkegaard’s father, in his desire to impress his child
with the sufferings of Christ, slipped in among his toys a picture
of the Crucifixion, so Rilke’s mother taught him to kiss the nail-
marks in the figure on the crucifix. As a result, one boy learnt
to love and revere, the other to loathe and fear, the human
sufferings of the Saviour. Like Goethe, Rilke grew up in re-
bellion against the Christian creed, but unlike the great poet
who did not dare to look at a coffin, he early came to terms with
death, and held it to be one of man’s chief duties to ‘“‘hold life
open towards death”. He believed at all times, as Goethe had
done, that the ethical teaching of Christ was the only pattern for
human beings and human society to follow ; like him, he was
constantly inspired and helped by the Bible; and like him, he

56