I first made the following selection almost ten years ago. Around 1960 I discovered Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and immediately became a militant feminist, as we were called in those days. At the same time, I had been reading Rilke casually for several years. That reading became more serious and comprehensive, and as it did I became increasingly aware that Rilke had not only anticipated Mlle. de Beauvoir by fifty years but had also gone far, far beyond her, and all the other women’s liberation advocates, as they are now called, as well. As good as her monumental study was, it stayed finally at the level of a socio-politicophysiological analysis of Western woman. And it was finally a masculine book with the masculine goal of freedom and equality as its primary focus. Which is not to gainsay either its contemporary relevance or final importance. But I have an incurably metaphysical mind, and I was not finally satisfied with her book. It unwittingly raised more questions than it answered, and the questions raised seemed somehow the deeper ones: questions of the ontology of the sexes, of what finally and at the deepest level the feminine is, of what being-human is, of what, most importantly, love is.
On the other hand, Rilke, as I discovered more and more, immediately went to these deepest levels, especially of the mythic nature of the feminine and of love, while not relinquishing the insights of the feminists themselves (among whom one of the earliest important figures, Ellen Key, was his friend, and among whom one of the greatest and most fantastic and, be it said, most neurotic, exemplars, Lou Andreas-Salomé, was his lover as well as lifelong friend). His working toward love at these depths was poetic, profound, and above all thoroughly radical. One of the amazing things about Rilke is that he started at the place where most of us at best manage finally to end up. An example of the radical nature of his inquiry is his almost by-the-way rejection of all conventionality of any kind, whether moral or “in the ordinary sense immoral.” As he softly but strikingly said, “In the depths all becomes law.” Other examples are his casual comments on happiness, his sense of the current absence of the gods and their eventual return, and his understanding of solitude and the provisional nature of being human.
This process of exploring love and what was happening with it in our time, and especially as manifested in the feminine, resulted in some surprising things regarding the masculine as well, to say nothing of the relation between art and sex or of the sexual experience of the young. And all of this was done through the most beautiful and provocative metaphors, primarily those of growth and of sex. It should be emphasized that Rilke’s language is thoroughly sensual throughout all his writings. There is probably no more sensual poet in any language. All of his metaphors, his “figures,” have deliberate sexual undertones (or overtones). The same holds true for his letters. Rilke’s justly famed deep spirituality is rooted finally and forever in the earth, in the senses, in sex. In fact, a close reading will manifest a surprising relationship toward sex between Rilke and Norman Mailer, whose approach, especially in The Prisoner of Sex, is ostensibly so different.
To share my regard for this dimension of Rilke, I prepared, as I have said, the following selection from his voluminous letters. Letter writing was Rilke’s mode of exploration during the long periods between his well-known great creative bursts of poetry. And because he was not a systematic thinker (but was a profound one for all that), his writings on love and the feminine were scattered. I have brought them together here and arranged them in what is, I think, a unified essay—suggestive and subtle, but with a definite progression nonetheless. I am convinced that these words of Rilke are of crucial importance for us who have, in the words of someone (I forget who), passed from puritanism to promiscuity without ever having experienced genuine love, erōs, deep sensuality, what Suzanne Lilar (an unjustly ignored feminine thinker) called sacral love.
This is not a complete selection of Rilke—s writings on the topic by any means, but other passages could not be easily fitted into the unified essay. One such passage might be quoted here because of its importance and by the way of introduction to the essay:
So I began to read [an essay on love], yesterday, but did not get very far. What is this curious mixture of virtuosity and incapacity they call by that name here (and cannot mention often enough)? On the one hand the most exquisite skill, on the other everlasting frustration. Do you know what I felt like, leafing through Plato’s Symposium for the first time in a long while? When I first read it, I dwelt alone in Rome in a tiny house deep in an ancient park (the same house where I began Brigge, as yet unaware of what was to become of it). My friend, I grasped one thing then, predisposed as I may have been—there is no beauty in Eros; and when Socrates said so and in his cautious way waited for his younger and more volatile conversational antagonist to block all other paths, one by one, leaving but the one way open—that Eros is not beautiful—Socrates himself then walking that path toward his god, serene and pure in heart—how then my innermost nature took fire that Eros could not be fair! I saw him just as Socrates had invoked him, lean and hard and always a little out of breath, sleepless, troubled day and night about the two between whom he trod, to and fro, hither and yon, ceaselessly accosted by both: yes, that was Eros. Truly, how they mistook him who thought he was fair, envied his soft life. Ah, he was slender and tanned and covered with the dust of the road, but there was no peace for him amid the two of them (for when, I say, is there not distance left between them?); and when he came he spoke with fervor of the other’s beauty, teasing each heart to grow fairer, goading it on. Surely there is much in the book—we do not grasp it yet: once upon a time it was grasped—who lost it? How do we spend the centuries? Where is he among us who dare speak of love?
Verily, nature speaks not of love; nature bears it in her heart and none knows the heart of nature. Verily, God bears love in the world, yet the world overwhelms us. Verily, the mother speaks not of love, for it is borne for her within the child, and the child destroys it. Verily, the spirit speaks not of love, for the spirit thrusts it into the future, and the future is remote. Verily, the lover speaks not of love, for to the lover it comes in sorrow, and sorrow sheds tears.
Who has yet answered these questions? Who has thought, seriously, that there is no beauty in Eros? And especially, who dares speak at all of love? Rilke did—and if he found no final answers, he unquestionably gestured toward some hitherto unexplored but increasingly fruitful paths.
A final word: most of the following was written when Rilke was only in his late twenties; and, even more surprising, the first sentence of it was written when Rilke was forty-five.