If only there were stillness, full, complete.
If all the random and approximate
were muted, with neighbors’ laughter, for your sake,
and if the clamor that my senses make
did not confound the vigil I would keep –Then in a thousandfold thought I could think
you out, even to your utmost brink,
and (while a smile endures) possess you, giving
you away, as though I were but giving thanks,
to all the living.— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours (1905)
Many years ago, I was in college and also a huge fan of The Book of Hours by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Today I wonder if this was an adolescent infatuation — one of those things you get into fantastically but later feel embarrassed about. Still, I was a spiritual seeker then, trying to read about different religions and all types of literature to figure out what it all meant. I had a kind of frenemy in my freshman year who was a young evangelical, and I shared this Rilke poem with her:
What will you do, God, when I die?
I am your jar (if cracked, I lie?)
Your well-spring (if the well go dry?)
I am your craft, your vesture I—
You lose your purport, losing me.When I go, your cold house will be
Empty of words that made it sweet.
I am the sandals your bare feet
Will seek and long for, wearily.Your cloak will fall from aching bones.
Your glance, that my warm cheeks have cheered
As with a cushion long endeared,
Will wonder at a loss so weird;
And, when the sun has disappeared,
Lie in the lap of alien stones.What will you do, God? I am feared.
My friend very much did not agree with this. She literally said, “I don’t agree with that.” She understandably felt that Rilke was setting the human or the individual above God — as if God depended on us for her or his or its existence, which definitely goes against the tenets of American evangelicalism.
As an agnostic or a seeker, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But I wonder why the poem appealed to me so much at the time. Rilke’s work has been described as “love poems to God,” though I do not think that was his actual wording. It was written when he was young-ish and full of young-ish ardor and curiosity and wondering.
If one says they love God, then what does it mean? The Greeks liked to parcel out love into various different categories, but I think what Rilke was getting at is that our relationship with God, or the great unknown, if there is one, is much like the love we feel for another person. If you truly fall in love, you may feel — what am I without you? We’re two drops of water, as an old Italian saying goes. How can we exist without each other? How could God exist without her creation? I don’t think Rilke was arrogantly placing man above God, as my old friend seemed to think. He was writing a love poem. We are coexistent. And maybe extremely codependent.
Anyway, here are our editors’ reading recommendations for this week:
- One of the greatest things of all time: Context-Free Patent Art
- Maria Popova’s beautiful philosophical meditation on The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative Experience (Marginalian)
- Shiri Pasternak on “A Theory of the List: From runaway slave lists to Canary Mission, the state has long deputized citizens to enforce its will.” (Boston Review)
- Shane Burley on MAHA and the end of American modernity (Jacobin)
- Michael Fuerstein says “Sometimes democracy works — Same-sex marriage is an astonishing case of progress propelled by democracy, in the face of public spite and misinformation” (Aeon)
- Our ultimate boy Romeo Guzmán talks about SoCal History: How Mexican Repatriation impacted the region in the 1930s on the radio with Larry Mantle (LAist)
- Flying cars crash into each other at Chinese air show (BBC)
- MAGA darling lawyer who took Biden to Supreme Court now calls Trump ‘way worse’ (The Independent)
- The crackdown on Charlie Kirk critics has ignited a free speech debate. Legal experts say it sets a dangerous precedent. (CBS News)
- Trans shooters disinformation surges after Charlie Kirk’s death. Some fear retribution. (USA Today)
- Outkast’s ‘Aquemini,’ the blueprint of the Southern Black renaissance, turns 20 (Andscape)
- Trip on the Zhuangzi tip with “Essence is fluttering: As Zhuangzi saw, there is no immutably true self. Instead our identity is as dynamic and alive as a butterfly in flight” (Aeon)
- The U.S. Dollar falls and falls (Morgan Stanley)
- All The Scary Far-Right Groups Black Folks Should Know About (The Root)
- The great Sheila Fitzpatrick on Two Cultures of Denunciation:
From the MAGA perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their place. If it hurts corrupt bureaucrats and phoneys, so much the better: this is payback time. Or, as Stalin would have put it, it’s class war.
- What I Wanted, What I Got: Lifelong lessons in yearning and style. (New Yorker)
- Polar Bears Move Into Houses In Abandoned Research Town In Russia
