March 7, 2011

As the Century Ends

 Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé
with poet Spiridon Drozin, in Russia 1900

I'm living just as the century ends.

A great leaf, that God and you and I
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.

The Book of Hours I, 8

11 comments:

  1. Wish I would've read this as the world turned from 1999 to 2000, that would have been something, as this is so fitting. To have witnessed such an age, as Rilke did, and now, 100 years later, to witness our own age, is sometimes beyond words.

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  2. I first got a computer in late 1999 because I wanted to see first hand Y2K.

    That was a disappointment when nothing happened, but I am the richer for learning on line.

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  3. To think that recently, relatively speaking, we too turned the page of a century. I'm taken with this image of Lou Andreas Salome. She's so much connected with the psychoanalytic movement in its inception. It must have been so different in hose days.

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  4. This is very, very poignant to me. At the fin de siecle Rilke was hopeful, turning the brightness of a new page. But ahead of him and all those sitting there was World War I, which was such a grief, and the whole century, which some say was one of the worst in human history (though I wonder if we are just more aware of its horrors). Rilke would be separated from his beloved Lou because of the war. The soft countryside of Europe would be cut into and its sons laid upon it. I am sorry to be morbid. But maybe even if Rilke had known what lay ahead, he would have looked forward to a new clean page, and that is our nature, isn't it? Regardless of what has gone before, or what may lie ahead, we hope for something better. Yet the fates take a look at each other . . .

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  5. i was thinking much the same as terresa and then thinking in terms of any new day. steven

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  6. i was first struck by the tremendous self belief rilke exhibits and rather pleased for it,
    A great leaf, that God and you and I
    have covered with writing
    turns now, overhead, in strange hands.

    he really believed that his power of self investigation would get him into the truth of it all. that in itself is promising. and then i remembered, my god, his life took that form, seeking out artists who worked to shed the mundane workings of life and instead explore the internal beatings. they all wrote upon that leaf, and god too, that independent hand of light and dark. it's an incredible photograph, the community of it all, with the page central.

    and as you point out, ruth, the optimism of the turning page. but my god, was i chilled at the fate's so quietly looking beyond any poet's work and only at one another. both our relevance and irrelevance in such a short poem.

    xo
    erin

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  7. Ruth, your comment that "at the fin de siecle Rilke was hopeful" is an odd but true statement about Rilke, that that morbid arts movement (so full of images of drowned Ophelia & subsumed cathedrals) was at the same time stirring and hopeful for Rilke: out of one death, life .. And yet the truth was that death would follow death, that the psychic moment of the fin de siecle was morbidly prescient of the bloodbath to come. And yet somehow, in all that, maybe even because of that, Rilke could come to say, "Praising is what matters!" Embracing death and life at once. ... And maybe part of Rilke's appeal is that he is weirdly contemporary, of our time a century removed. inhabiting the early decades of the last century and leaving behind poems we pick up, fresh not with his age but the calibration of our shared moment in Time. - Brendan

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  8. I find fascinating the invocation of both God and fates, especially so because I saw this weekend the new film "The Adjustment Bureau" that addresses Plan and Chance, what's supposed to be vs what might or could or even is, and how one thing not counted on (in the film, the power of love's tug) can change everything.

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  9. It's worth reading Rilke's "Book Of Hours" with As The Century Ends in context. There's a secular spirituality that reads rather contemporary. It's striking, really.

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  10. I am beginning to think of the fin de siecle as a period of suspended animation. All of the forces that would erupt in Sarajevo in 1914 held at bay (like the panther?), as if the 20th century did not truly begin until 1914 (or perhaps 1910 when "human character changed" according to Virginia Woolf). And Rilke, all his senses aquiver felt this,turning "in strange hands", "the sweep of it like a wind."
    Are we only now entering the 21st century?
    When did the 20th century end?
    The fates are silent. But the page is bright. Isn't it?

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"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Go ahead, bloom recklessly!