里尔克与罗丹
From “You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin”
Biographers would begin at the beginning. They would describe a boy too busy etching his dull blade into wood to eat. A young man working at a vase factory in Sèvres. They would identify his early influences — Dante, Baudelaire, and Michelangelo — and his youthful prophetic awakening, the flash point upon which his future genius hinged. It would be both “common and touching.”传记作家会从头开始。他们会描述一个男孩忙着把他的钝刀片刻进木头里吃不下东西。一个在塞弗里斯的花瓶工厂工作的年轻人。他们会发现他早期的影响，但丁，波德莱尔和米开朗基罗，以及他年轻的预言性觉醒，这是他未来天才的闪光点。这将是既“普通又感人”
But this would be the wrong way to tell the story of Auguste Rodin, or at least not the way Rainer Maria Rilke wanted to tell it. In October, Rodin went to visit a friend in Italy, leaving Rilke with three uninterrupted weeks to write his monograph. At his broken-down desk in the hostel, he began to imagine all the ways he might approach the dreaded first page.但这将是一个错误的方式来讲述奥古斯特·罗丁的故事，或者至少不是雷纳·玛丽亚·里尔克想要讲述的方式。10月，罗丹去意大利看望一位朋友，留给里尔克三个星期不间断地写他的专著。在旅社那张破旧的书桌前，他开始想象他可能会怎样接近可怕的第一页。
He stared out the window at the brick wall on the other side. He paced and procrastinated. Unaccustomed to shutting his windows, he suffered the fatty stench of pommes frites wafting in and commingling with iodine vapors from the hospitals. When the odor became overwhelming, he took a walk to the Luxembourg Gardens, leaned his head against the gate, and took a deep breath. But even then the smell of flowers, packed too tightly into their sidewalk gardens, irritated his delicate senses.他凝视着窗外的砖墙。他步履蹒跚。由于不习惯关窗，他闻到了油炸土豆条的油腻气味，并与医院里的碘蒸气混合在一起。当臭气扑面而来时，他走到卢森堡花园，把头靠在大门上，深吸了一口气。但即便如此，人行道上花园里挤得太紧的花香也刺激了他敏感的感官。
He would always return to the hotel by eight o’clock, before the drunks invaded the streets. Back at his desk, the smell replaced in the evenings by burnt kerosene from the lamp, he considered starting the book with explanations of the sculptures that made Rodin famous. But Rodin’s fame had nothing to do with his work, he decided. He wrote it down on his stationery: “Fame is no more than the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.”他总是在八点钟以前回到旅馆，以免醉汉们闯入街道。回到书桌旁，晚上的气味被油灯里烧过的煤油所取代，他考虑着在这本书的开头解释一下让罗丹成名的雕塑作品。但他认为，罗丹的名声与他的工作无关。他在信纸上写下：“名望不过是围绕一个新名字而产生的所有误解的总和。”
Nor could it begin with Rodin’s childhood, because, after observing the sculptor in the flesh, Rilke had concluded that Rodin was born great. His eminence felt as eternal as that of a Gothic cathedral, or a chestnut tree in full bloom. To tell that story, Rilke would have to start in the branches and grow backward, reaching down into the trunk, then plunging into the dirt where the cracked seed lay.这也不能从罗丹的童年开始，因为里尔克在观察了这位雕塑家的肉身后得出结论，罗丹天生伟大。他的显赫地位就像哥特式大教堂或盛开的栗树一样永恒。要讲这个故事，里尔克必须从树枝开始向后生长，向下伸入树干，然后掉进裂开的种子所在的泥土里。
Rilke lay down in bed, knowing he wouldn’t sleep. The vibrating trams kept him from fully relaxing. Even if he did doze off for a moment, the neighbors would soon be coming home, stomping up the steps so loudly that he’d jolt upright in fear that they would barge right through the door.里尔克躺在床上，知道自己睡不着觉。振动的电车使他无法完全放松。即使他打了一会儿盹，邻居们也很快就要回家了，他们在台阶上跺得很响，他会直着身子摇晃，生怕他们会闯进来。
Lying there awake, he would often summon Baudelaire, like a guardian angel. Rilke would recite to himself the beginning of his prose poem “One O’Clock in the Morning” from Paris Spleen: “At last! I am alone! ... the tyranny of the human face has disappeared.” But then he would begin to compare himself to Baudelaire and a new anxiety would set in.他醒着躺在那里，常常像守护天使一样召唤波德莱尔。里尔克会自言自语地背诵他的散文诗《清晨一点钟》的开头部分：“终于！我一个人。。。但是，他开始把自己比作波德莱尔，一种新的焦虑就会产生。
Rodin never had this problem. He never questioned why he was an artist, or whether he should be. He knew that such doubts only distracted one from work, and Rilke was beginning to accept that work was all there was. He had spent so much time with the master by now that he could hold an entire conversation with him in his head:罗丹从来没有这个问题。他从不质疑自己为什么是艺术家，或者他是否应该成为艺术家。他知道这样的疑虑只会分散一个人的注意力，里尔克开始接受工作就是一切。到现在为止，他和主人在一起的时间太多了，以至于他可以在脑子里跟他进行一次完整的对话：
“What was your life like?”
“Good.”
“Did you have any enemies?”
“None that could keep me from my work.”
“And fame?”
“It made work a duty.”
“And your friends?”
“They expected work from me.”
“And women?”
“I learned to admire them in the course of my work.”
“But you were young once?”
“Then I was like all the rest. You know nothing when you are young; that comes later, and only slowly.”
In Rodin’s absence, Rilke sought out the company of other artists he admired. He met the Spanish portrait painter Ignacio Zuloaga, who was only five years older than Rilke but already well established in Europe, with several works on view at the Venice Biennale that year. From his barrel chest and thick black mustache the Basque artist exhaled an effortless confidence. He did not bother making sketches for his paintings, instead outlining figures in black streaks of charcoal directly on the canvas, then filling them in with a dark palette of paints.在罗丹不在的情况下，瑞尔克找到了他所敬佩的其他艺术家的公司。他会见了西班牙肖像画家伊格纳西奥·祖洛加，他比里尔克大5岁，但在欧洲已经很有名气，当年威尼斯双年展上有几部作品正在观看。巴斯克艺术家从桶胸和浓密的黑胡子中散发出毫不费力的自信。他不必为自己的画画草图，而是直接在画布上用黑色的木炭勾画人物，然后用深色的颜料填充。
Rodin had been so impressed with Zuloaga that he once traded him three bronze sculptures for one painting. Rilke would later conclude that, aside from Rodin, Zuloaga was the only figure in Paris “who affected me deeply and lastingly.” But their connection seems to have been largely one-sided. Despite several letters expressing Rilke’s admiration for the Basque painter, Zuloaga never responded as enthusiastically as Rilke probably would have liked. Yet Zuloaga did allow him to visit his studio once, where he introduced him to another great master: El Greco. The stormy biblical scenes of the Greek-born Spanish Renaissance painter struck Rilke with a violent intensity he had only before known in nightmares. El Greco’s misproportioned bodies, long and sinuous as candle flames, seemed so far ahead of the present day, much less that of the sixteenth century, when they were painted.罗丹对祖洛加印象很深，有一次他用三尊青铜雕塑换了一幅画。里尔克后来得出的结论是，除了罗丹之外，祖洛加是巴黎唯一一个“深深地、持久地影响着我”的人物，但他们之间的联系似乎基本上是片面的。尽管有几封信表达了里尔克对巴斯克画家的钦佩之情，但祖洛加从未像里尔克希望的那样热情地回信。然而，祖洛加确实允许他参观过自己的工作室，在那里他向他介绍了另一位大师：埃尔·格雷科。这位出生于希腊的西班牙文艺复兴时期画家的《圣经》中风雨飘摇的场景给里尔克带来了强烈的震撼力，这是他以前在噩梦中才知道的。埃尔·格雷科（El Greco）的错配尸体，长而曲折，像蜡烛火焰一样蜿蜒，似乎遥遥领先于今天，更不用说是在16世纪，当他们被画的时候。
That month, Rilke also had to arrange for the imminent arrival of his wife, Clara Westhoff, in Paris. He rented them each apartments a few blocks south of his Latin Quarter hostel, at 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée. They would share the same roof, but keep separate rooms. The couple saw each other only on Sundays, when they often read each other passages from Niels Lyhne. For her birthday, Rilke bought her a volume of Gustave Geffroy’s essays, The Artistic Life, and inscribed it, “To Clara. The beloved mother. The artist. The friend. The woman.” No mention of the wife or the lover. But Westhoff may not have minded the omission then. She had already received several sculpture commissions within that first month, so this second residency in Paris was already proving far more rewarding than her first.那个月，里尔克还不得不安排妻子克拉拉·韦斯特霍夫（Clara Westhoff）即将抵达巴黎。他把每套公寓都租给了他拉丁区旅社南面几个街区的公寓，地址是3 rue de l'abbe de l'pée，他们共用一个屋顶，但各有不同的房间。这对夫妇只在星期天见面，那时他们经常互相读尼尔斯·莱恩的短文。生日那天，里尔克给她买了一本古斯塔夫·格夫罗伊的散文集《艺术人生》，并题词“致克拉拉”。亲爱的母亲。艺术家。朋友。“女人。”没有提到妻子或情人。但韦斯特霍夫可能并不介意这样的省略。在第一个月内，她已经收到了几件雕塑作品的委托，所以这次在巴黎的第二次居住已经证明比她第一次获得更多的回报。
Most importantly, she finally had Rodin’s eyes. She brought him her work for critique nearly every Saturday, when he hosted an open house at his studio. “The nearness of Rodin, which does not confuse her, gives to her effort and becoming and growth a certain security and peace — and it proves to be good for her to be in Paris,” Rilke wrote. Of a visit to Meudon with her husband, she recalled a feeling “of being set free, of being surrounded by everything that did one good. The beautiful figures and fragments stood next to one in the grass or against the sky, the lawn invited one as if to children’s games, and in the middle of a little depression an antique torso stood in the sun.”最重要的是，她终于拥有了罗丹的眼睛。几乎每个星期六，当他在工作室主持一个开放式招待会时，她几乎每个星期六都带着她的作品来征求他的意见。里尔克写道：“罗丹的近在咫尺，这并没有让她感到困惑，这给了她努力、成长和成长带来了某种安全与和平，事实证明，她在巴黎是件好事。”。她回忆起她丈夫在我身边所做的一切。那些美丽的身影和残片挨着一个站在草地上或是靠着天空，草坪上像是在邀请人们参加儿童游戏，在一个小小的凹陷处，一个古色古香的躯干站在阳光下。”
By this time, Rilke had nearly finished writing the monograph. He had observed and considered Rodin’s art from every angle and it had changed the way he saw the world: “Already flowers are often so infinitely much to me, and excitements of a strange kind have come to me from animals. And already I am sometimes experiencing even people in this way, hands are living somewhere, mouths are speaking, and I look at everything more quietly and with greater justness.” But while Rilke was learning to see like an artist, he had not yet mastered the handicraft of one. Where was the “tool of my art, the hammer, my hammer?” he wondered. How could he build objects out of words? How could he apply the principles of Rodin’s art to his poetry?此时，里尔克几乎完成了专著的写作。他从各个角度观察和思考了罗丹的艺术，这改变了他看待世界的方式：“花对我来说已经是无限的了，动物也给我带来了一种奇怪的兴奋。我有时甚至已经在体验这样的人，手在某处活动，嘴巴在说话，我更安静、更公正地看待一切。”但里尔克学习如何像艺术家一样看东西，他还没有掌握一个人的手工艺。“我的艺术工具，锤子，我的锤子”在哪里？”他想知道。他怎么能用文字来建造？他怎么能把罗丹的艺术原理运用到他的诗歌中呢？
Rodin suggested that Rilke try out an assignment that he himself had undertaken as a student many years earlier. Regardez les animaux, professor Barye had told young Rodin. To the aspiring figurative sculptor, staring at beasts had seemed a second-rate task. But Rodin soon understood why animals have been objects of reverence for artists dating back to the cave painters.罗丹建议里尔克尝试一项他自己多年前作为学生承担的任务。巴耶教授告诉年轻的罗丹。对于这位有抱负的具象雕塑家来说，凝视野兽似乎是一项二流的任务。但是罗丹很快就明白了为什么动物一直是洞穴画家们崇拜的对象。
Zoos at that time were research centers for the study of heretofore undiscovered specimens and symbols of colonial might. Displaying a lion or monkey at home paid tribute to France’s brave explorers abroad. For artists, they were museums of animals, providing contact with previously unseen aesthetic forms. For Barye, the Jardin des Plantes “was his Africa and Asia,” the author Henry James once said. The painter Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau also spent years seated on a bench there, taking inspiration for his dreamlike jungle tableaux.当时的动物园是研究迄今未被发现的标本和殖民力量象征的研究中心。在国内展示一只狮子或猴子是为了纪念法国在国外勇敢的探险家。对艺术家来说，它们是动物博物馆，提供了与以前看不见的审美形式的接触。作家亨利·詹姆斯曾经说过，对巴耶来说，植物园“是他的非洲和亚洲”。画家亨利·卢梭（Henri“Le Douanier”Rousseau）也坐在那里的长椅上数年，为他梦幻般的丛林场景寻找灵感。
For Rilke, the menagerie of bears, gazelles, flamingos, and snakes was a sanctuary compared to the human zoo on the other side of the gates. He began to study the caged animals, displayed behind bars like objects, the way Rodin looked at sculptures on pedestals. Each one was a frontier to be discovered. To guide him on this journey, Rilke recalled the teachings of his old professor from Munich, Theodor Lipps, and devised a process of conscious observation, which he would come to call einsehen, or “inseeing.”对里尔克来说，与城门另一边的人类动物园相比，熊、瞪羚、火烈鸟和蛇的动物园是一个庇护所。他开始研究关在笼子里的动物，像物品一样陈列在栅栏后面，就像罗丹看基座上的雕塑一样。每一个都是有待发现的前沿。为了引导他踏上这段旅程，里尔克回忆起慕尼黑的老教授西奥多·利普斯（Theodor Lipps）的教诲，并设计了一种有意识的观察过程，他称之为“艾因森”（Einsheen）或“嵌入”
Inseeing described the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection. Rilke made a point of distinguishing inseeing from inspecting, a term which he thought described only the viewer’s perspective, and thus often resulted in anthropomorphizing. Inseeing, on the other hand, took into account the object’s point of view. It had as much to do with making things human as it did with making humans thing.因塞因描述了从事物表面到心灵的奇妙旅程，其中感知导致情感联系。里尔克强调区分插入和观察，他认为这个术语只描述了观察者的视角，因此常常导致拟人化。另一方面，插入时考虑了物体的角度。它和创造人类有着同样多的关系。
If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.例如，如果面对一块岩石，你应该凝视岩石开始形成的地方。然后观察者应该继续观察，直到他自己的中心开始下沉，岩石的重量也在他体内形成。它是一种发生在身体内部的感知，它要求观察者既是先知又是被看见者。用同理心去观察，一个人不仅用眼睛看，而且用皮肤看。
“Though you may laugh,” Rilke wrote to a friend, “if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing — in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.”“尽管你可能会笑，”里尔克在给一个朋友的信中写道，“如果我告诉你我最伟大的感觉，我的世界感觉，我的尘世幸福在哪里，我必须向你坦白：它是，一次又一次地，在这里和那里，在这样一个上帝般的看见中，无法形容的迅速，深刻，永恒的时刻。”
In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy, when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy, when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy, when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy, when gestures or movements convey internal feelings.在描述他以这种方式体验世界的喜悦时，里尔克与利普斯的观点相呼应，即通过移情，一个人可以从思想的孤独中解脱出来。里尔克在巴黎动物园学习的同时，利普斯还在慕尼黑研究他的移情和审美享受理论。在他关于这个主题的开创性论文中，他指出了他所看到的四种移情类型：当一个人看到日常事物中的运动时的一般感知移情；经验移情，当一个人看到非人类的人性品质时；情绪移情，当一个人把情绪状态归因于颜色和音乐，如“欢快的黄色”；当手势或动作传达内心感受时，表现出的是感性的外表移情。
Animals provided Rilke with a uniquely rewarding case study of his old professor’s teachings. One can relate to animals on the basis that they possess drives similar to those of people, but because they do not share with people a common language they remain fundamentally mysterious to us. Artists can scrutinize animals as curiosities, then, but unlike objects, animals look back. The two-way gaze tethers these separate lives together and fulfills the “beholder’s involvement,” which the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl argued was a necessary component in a successful work of art.动物为里尔克提供了一个对他老教授的教导有独特价值的案例研究。我们可以根据动物拥有与人类相似的驱力来与它们联系，但由于它们与人类没有共同的语言，它们对我们来说仍然是一种基本的神秘。艺术家们可以把动物当作珍品来审视，但是动物和实物不同，它们会回头看。双向凝视将这些不同的生活捆绑在一起，实现了“旁观者的参与”，奥地利艺术史学家阿洛伊斯·里格尔认为，这是成功艺术作品的必要组成部分。
Rilke returned to the zoo day after day, practicing his inseeing skills before returning home at night to draft rough portraits of the creatures he had seen. He found himself especially drawn to a solitary panther, pacing in its cage. It reminded him of a small plaster panther that Rodin kept in his studio. The sculptor adored the thing so much — “‘C’est beau, c’est tout,’ he says of it” — that Rilke had gone to the Bibliothèque Nationale to see the original bronze version it was modeled after. He visited that display cabinet again and again until he finally began to understand what Rodin saw in it:
And from this little plaster cast I saw what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the same time, that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness.
The plaster panther stirred in Rilke a sensation much like what Rodin had felt when he stumbled upon Barye’s greyhounds in a shop window, when he realized that an inanimate object could move with as much vitality as a living beast. Rilke had this in mind when he began to describe the panther in one of his impressionistic zoo sketches, which he called his “mood-images,” and later when he developed it into “The Panther,” one of his most celebrated poems. It begins with an image of the cat circling its cage:
His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds no more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
— Translated by M.D. Herter Norton
A reader might be tempted to see the panther’s pacing as a reference to Rilke’s own artistic plight. Yet there is no poet present here. Rilke does not draw attention to himself with his old florid descriptions. He tells us nothing about the panther’s size, for example, or the texture of its fur. He instead defines it only in terms of its captivity: it becomes the freedom it does not possess. The “passing” bars move, while the animal has become the cage, become thing.
The perspective then shifts from Rilke’s to the panther’s when it begins to hear the sound of its feet padding around. In doing so, Rilke makes the circuit of empathy itself a subject of the poem. Near the end, Rilke returns to the panther’s eyes: “the curtain of the pupil / soundlessly parts — .” Then images enter its vision, tunnel into the center of its body and into its heart, where they are captured and consumed for eternity.
Rilke had at last found a way out of himself and into the material world of objects. Just as young Rodin memorized paintings in the Louvre, the poet now allowed images to gather and take shape inside him before writing. He received them rather than created them, waiting while they formed him. It was as his future protagonist Malte Laurids Brigge would say, “Poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) — they are experiences.”
Written in November 1902, “The Panther” was Rilke’s first composition for his breakthrough collection of New Poems, which he often referred to as his “thing-poems.” This sculpturally composed work, deeply bearing the mark of Rodin, was also his first attempt at a kind of alchemy of mediums. It was a radical poetic experiment, “as revolutionary in its way as anything by Eliot or Pound,” wrote John Banville in the New York Review of Books years later. But this one poem did not bring about the artistic transformation that Rilke sought so desperately then.
As fall turned into winter and the wordless days turned to months, “still nothing has happened,” he said. He continued to see Rodin as a stream rushing in its path, leaving behind the people and facts of his daily life to “lie there like an empty riverbed through which he no longer flows.” But the poet could not stop his creativity from splintering off into dozens of aimless channels, no matter how badly he wanted to “course through one riverbed and become great.”
Was he too weak? Did he want it too desperately? He had once believed that digging his roots into the ground with a house and a family would render him “more visible, more tangible, more factual.” But while the reality was certainly more concrete, “it was a reality outside me,” he said. It did nothing to help him achieve the existential change “for which I yearn so strongly: To be a real person among real things.”
•
That fall, while Rilke was writing “The Panther,” a nineteen-year-old Austrian cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus sat in the shade of a hundred-year-old chestnut tree with a book of poetry. A student at the Theresian Military Academy, Kappus was an aspiring writer disguised in a soldier’s uniform. When he heard about a radical new poet who was modernizing German Romanticism, he picked up the author’s recent collection In Celebration of Myself and settled into the grass.
Rebelling against the Romantic tradition, Rilke had begun filling his pages with saints, angels, and gods, harnessing the potency of religious symbolism, but secularizing it. In one work, a Christ character sleeps with prostitutes and mourns his failure to impregnate Mary Magdalene. Rilke’s irreverence made him a hero among a younger generation. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled how he and his classmates used to copy Rilke and Nietzsche verses into their textbooks to read while the teacher delivered some “time-worn lecture” about Friedrich Schiller.
One can imagine that Kappus, not two years younger than Zweig, felt similar awe at discovering Rilke’s disaffected verses for the first time. The cadet became so engrossed in the book that afternoon that he almost did not notice one of his favorite teachers, Franz Horaček, had come over. The professor took the book from Kappus’s hands and looked at the cover: “Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?” He flipped through the pages, glancing at the verses and running a finger along the binding. Then he shook his head and said, “So our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.”
Horaček explained that he had been chaplain of St. Pölten some fifteen years earlier, when the pale, sickly boy was a student there. He described Rilke as “a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy, who liked to keep to himself.” He had “patiently endured” life at the junior academy until his fourth year, but after he graduated on to the next level of military school, his parents withdrew him. Horaček had not heard any news of him since.
Kappus could not help but begin lining up the similarities between Rilke and himself. Both poets had come to military academies from Slavic cities in the east, Rilke from Prague and Kappus from the Romanian town of Timișoara. They both had lingered at the threshold of military careers that they felt were “entirely contrary” to their nature, as Kappus put it. As he thought about how the two young men had stood on the same soil, worn the same uniform, and shared the same dream, Kappus thought to write a letter to Rilke, the poet in whom he “hoped to find understanding, if in anyone.” He told Rilke about their mutual acquaintance Horaček and enclosed a few of his own poems, asking for Rilke’s opinion.
•
Rilke was hardly qualified to give career advice at that point in his life. In December, he turned in the Rodin monograph, but the measly fee hardly made a difference. He still could not even afford to send friends copies of his books — “I cannot buy them myself,” he admitted at the time. Meanwhile, royalties from previous projects were running thin.
He and Westhoff spent the holidays in Paris, lonely for their friends and family abroad. Rilke wrote Otto Modersohn a New Year’s letter to soften the tensions with his old friend. He complained about Paris, saying that “the beautiful things there are here do not quite compensate, even with their radiant eternity, for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people, and things.” He urged Modersohn to “stick to your country!” The only good thing about Paris was Rodin, he said. “Time flows off him, and as he works thus, all, all the days of his long life, he seems inviolable, sacrosanct, and almost anonymous.”
Rilke did not need to convince Modersohn. “That dreadful wild city is not to your taste — Oh I can believe that,” he wrote back to Rilke. To him, cities bred the sicknesses of egotism, Nietzscheanism, and modernism. “Nothing, nothing at all is more important to me than my peaceful, serious countryside. I could never endure living in such a city — I should look at and enjoy the art that is stored up there and then quickly return to my peace and quiet.”
But while Modersohn was content to sink into the sofa, pipe in mouth, and stay there all night, his wife had not yet exhausted her curiosities about foreign landscapes. Paula Becker was, at twenty-six, too young to give up and become one of those hard Worpswede peasant women, bitter and “bound to the plow,” as Rilke once wrote. The village’s monotonous routines, and the staid landscape painting it had been producing, was starting to dull her senses. Ever since she and Westhoff had gone to Paris three years earlier, German artists seemed so obedient compared to the French. No one in Paris seemed to care whether their work achieved consensus. The mere thought of returning there quickened Becker’s pulse to this day.
Now that the Rilkes were back in touch, she saw her chance. Modersohn did not love the idea of his wife traveling alone. But he knew he still owed her for the sacrifice she made by attending a ghastly cooking school, and agreed that she could make the trip in February 1903. Becker could barely contain her excitement when she boarded the train for Paris that winter, just in time for her twenty-seventh birthday. She imagined her Parisian life picking up right where it had left off, with days occupied by art galleries, champagne, and philosophical discussions with Westhoff, then Saturdays spent galavanting around the countryside. When she arrived, Becker rented the same little hotel room where they had stayed as students.
On the first evening Rilke and Westhoff were free to meet, Becker rushed over to their Latin Quarter building, eager as a puppy. She regaled them with gossip about Worpswede, but they seemed not to care, as if her small-town stories were beneath them. It wasn’t that they were rude; it was worse than that. They were cordial. There was no warmth, no familiarity, and, on top of it all, they seemed totally miserable. All they did was complain about money and feeling over-worked. When Becker tried to convince them to take some time off and join her on a day-trip to the country they declined, insisting they had to work.
The Rilkes “trumpet gloom,” Becker wrote to her husband the next day. “Ever since Rodin said to [them], ‘Travailler, toujours travailler,’ they have been taking it literally; they never want to go to the country on Sundays and seem to be getting no more fun out of their lives at all.” Rilke spoke incessantly about Rodin and the monograph, a project that Becker believed was little more than thinly veiled social climbing. “Rilke is gradually diminishing to a rather tiny flame that wants to brighten its light through association with the radiance of the great spirits of Europe: Tolstoy, Muther, the Worpsweders, Rodin, Zuloaga, his newest friend,” she wrote to her husband. Westhoff’s latest work, a series of fragmented bodies, was also beginning to resemble Rodin’s a little too closely. “We shall see how she plans to avoid becoming a little Rodin herself,” Becker wrote.
The only benefit to the Rilkes’ obsession with Rodin was that it opened the door for Becker to meet the famous sculptor herself. Rilke told her that Rodin hosted an open house for friends and colleagues at his studio every Saturday. Rilke would write a note identifying her as the “wife of a very distinguished painter” — an insult not lost on Becker — which should secure her entry.
When she arrived the following weekend a crowd had already gathered at the studio. She hesitated at the edge of the room, attempting to compose herself before approaching the master to present her pass. When she finally summoned the nerve, she cautiously went up to him and held out the note. He nodded her along, not even glancing at it.
Once inside, Becker was free to examine the sculptures standing around the room as closely as she liked. Not each work resonated with her, but they gathered such force collectively that she decided she trusted Rodin’s intentions completely. “He doesn’t care whether the world approves or not,” she thought. On her way out she worked up the courage to ask him if she might one day visit his studio in Meudon. To her amazement, he didn’t flinch: Come next Sunday, he said.
When she arrived by train that weekend, an assistant informed her that Rodin was busy at the moment but she had his permission to wander the grounds on her own. Becker took a walk and revisited the pavilion of works she had first seen at the World’s Fair, recognizing now how deeply they expressed their maker’s “worship of nature.” After a while Rodin joined her and brought her to the studio. When he pulled out several reams of drawings, she was surprised to see how his process began with simple pencil lines that were then doused with watercolors. How unusual that such wild, blazing colors could come from such a mild man, she thought.
Before long Rodin launched into a familiar soliloquy: “Work,” he said, “that is my pleasure.” It was the precise rhetoric that exasperated her when it came from Rilke, but out of Rodin’s mouth every word was intoxicating. Becker believed that Rodin truly lived by his words; the proof surrounded her in every corner of this very room. But Rilke, who had only a few mediocre books to show for all his complaining, merely quoted Rodin’s words. Becker wrote to her husband that he must come to Paris at once, if only to be near Rodin. “Yes, whatever it is that makes art extraordinary is what he has.”
Becker’s exhilaration was cut short as soon as she returned to the Rilkes and their contagious misery, however. For a while she had been determined to salvage her trip and accommodate their interests over hers. Instead of a picnic in the countryside she went with them to see a show of Japanese paintings that contained flowing, childlike lines unlike anything she’d ever seen. But in March, Rilke fell ill again with his third bout of flu that winter. Becker brought tulips to him in bed but announced afterward that “I can’t stand him anymore.” She kissed her wedding ring and decided to cut her stay in Paris short.
As she waited for the train back to Worpswede she wrote to her husband that she believed Westhoff would be better off if Rilke went away for a while. Her bust commissions were picking up and his wallowing only brought her down.
•
Rilke’s opinion of himself was not much higher than Becker’s at that time. Having finished the Rodin monograph, he was left worrying once again where his next paycheck would come from, and where — or if — the inspiration for his next book would arise. “I cannot bring myself to write at all; and the consciousness alone that a connection exists between my writing and the days’ nourishment and necessaries, is enough to make my work impossible for me,” he wrote that spring to his friend Ellen Key, a Swedish psychologist and patron of the poet. “I must wait for the ringing in the silence, and I know that if I force the ringing, then it really won’t come.”
He had now cleared his desk bare, apart from a stack of unanswered mail. Finally, in February 1903, he sat down to respond to a letter that had come from a student at a military academy like the one he had attended as a boy. Rilke did not know this young man by the name of Franz Xaver Kappus, but he was pleased to see a reference to Professor Horaček. Rilke had always liked the man, who was the only teacher on staff who wasn’t also a military officer.
“My Dear Sir, Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great and kind confidence. I can hardly do more,” Rilke wrote in his looping black calligraphy.
Kappus had almost given up on a reply when the envelope bearing a blue seal and a Paris postmark arrived. The address was written in “beautiful, clear, sure characters,” he said. It “weighed heavy in the hand.”
When he opened it he found that Rilke had sent eight full pages in response to his two. Rilke, knowing how anxiously he had been waiting for his own bell of creativity to toll again, advised the young poet now to consider carefully whether he was prepared to bear the burden of the artistic condition.
“Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart,” Rilke wrote. Then ask yourself, would you “die if it were denied you to write. This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write?” If the heart utters a clear, “I must, then build your life according to this necessity,” but be prepared to surrender to the imperative forever, for art was not a choice, but an immutable disposition of the soul.
Rilke declined to critique the poems Kappus sent, other than to say that they possessed no distinctive voice and were “not yet independent.” He urged the poet not to send them to editors or critics again, himself included. That could only provide external validation, and a poet’s testament must come from within. Besides, nothing was further removed from art than criticism, Rilke said, and reviews “always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.”
Rilke’s response moved Kappus to write back immediately. We do not know what he said because his side of the correspondence was never published, but we know that they exchanged some twenty letters over the next five years. We also know that Kappus found Rilke’s wandering reflections on solitude, love, and art so touching, so deeply felt, that he predicted, in an astute understatement, that the letters would also stir the hearts of other “growing and evolving spirits of today and tomorrow.” Shortly after Rilke’s death he brought the letters to Westhoff and their daughter Ruth Rilke to ask if they’d like to have them published.
Rilke viewed his prolific letter-writing habit as a part of his poetic practice. He took such care in composing his correspondence — he would sooner rewrite an entire page of script than mar its surface with a crossed-out word — that he gave his publisher permission to posthumously release it. When Rilke died in 1926, Ruth and her husband, Carl Sieber, began sifting through the surviving seven thousand letters. They took several collections to his publishers: a set that Rilke wrote to the head of his Dutch publishing house in the last year of his life appeared in 1927, while another to his biographer Maurice Betz came out in 1928, as did his series of letters to Rodin. In 1929, Insel-Verlag released his correspondence with Kappus under the title Letters to a Young Poet.
Little is known about Kappus because Rilke’s family decided not to include the cadet’s name or biography in the original publication, although some later editions include a brief introduction by him. Nor is it known why Rilke maintained such a long correspondence with a stranger from whom he had nothing to gain. But from the way his letters often read as though they were written to his younger self, it is clear Rilke empathized with this young poet and fellow victim of that “long terrifying damnation” known as military school.
More importantly, however, was probably Kappus’s timing. His letter reached Rilke just as the poet had been trying to locate his own footing within Rodin’s in Paris, so he appreciated the imperative to find one’s form. Just as the puppet Pinocchio became “a real boy” once his father saw the good in him, young artists are affirmed when they see their reflection in a master’s eye.
Even though Rilke was himself sublimely naive at the time, Kappus had tacitly made himself Rilke’s disciple, and the older poet accepted this responsibility. He wrote Kappus letters in a tone of authority that only an amateur would dare — trying on the master’s robe and liking the way it fit. But Rilke knew he was in no position to offer career advice then, having told a friend that spring, “I have written eleven or twelve books and have received almost nothing for them, only four of them were paid for at all.” Instead of advising Kappus on the profession of poetry, he opted to guide him on the poetic life. That was what Rilke had asked of Rodin, and from then on his letters to Kappus would serve as his field notes.
推荐阅读：