The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke

into the ground at a slight angle, like a painted figurehead in an old sea-captain’s garden? Does it stand like that because it too had once been placed somewhere on the forward tip of its life, at the point where motion is greatest? Is it now so washed out because it was once so bright? Will you go ask it?
    Only don’t ask the women anything when you see them feeding the birds. You could even follow them; they do it just in passing; it would be easy. But leave them alone. They don’t know how it happens. All at once they have a whole purseful of bread, and they hold out large pieces from under their flimsy shawls, pieces that are a bit chewed and soggy. It does them good to think that their saliva is getting out into the world a little, that the small birds will fly off with the taste of it in their mouths, even though a moment later they naturally forget it again.
[IBSEN]
    There I sat before your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them as the others do, who don’t leave you in one piece but chip off their little portion and go away satisfied. For I still didn’t understand fame, that public demolition of someone who is in the process of becoming, whose building-site the mob breaks into, knocking down his stones.
    Young man anywhere, in whom something is welling up that makes you shiver, be grateful that no one knows you. And if those who think you are worthless contradict you, and if those whom you call your friends abandon you, and if they want to destroy you because of your precious ideas: what is this obvious danger, which concentrates you inside yourself, compared with the cunning enmity of fame, later, which makes you innocuous by scattering you all around?
    Don’t ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don’t take this more seriously than anything eise you might find in their mouths. Think rather that it has become cheapened, and throw it away. Take another name,
any
other, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone.
    Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have caught up with you because of your fame. A little while ago they were against you body and soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they pull your words around with them in the cages of their presumption, and exhibit them in the streets, and tease them a little, from a safe distance. All your terrifying wild beasts.
    When I first read you, these words broke loose and fell upon me in my wilderness, in all their desperation. As desperate as you yourself became in the end, you whose course is drawn incorrectly on every chart. Like a crack it crosses the heavens, this hopeless hyperbola of your path, which curves toward us only once, then recedes again in terror. What did you care if a woman stayed or left, if this man was seized by vertigo and that one by madness, if the dead were alive and the living seemed dead: what did you care? It was all so natural for you; you passed through it the way someone might walk through a vestibule, and didn’t stop. But you lingered, bent over, where our life boils and precipitates and changes color: inside. Farther in than anyone has ever been; a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight. In there, where, mistrustful, you wouldn’t take anyone with you, in there yousat and discerned transitions. And there, since your blood drove you not to form or to speak, but to reveal, there you made the enormous decision to so magnify these tiny events, which you yourself first perceived only in test tubes, that they would be seen by thousands of people, immense before them all. Your theater came into being. You couldn’t wait until this life almost without spatial reality, this life which had been condensed by the weight of the centuries into a few small drops, could be discovered by the other arts: until it could gradually be made