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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

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This is a profound and beautiful book. Ulrich Baer, editor and translator of the volume has gone through the more than seven- thousand letters Rilke wrote in his lifetime and selected those he felt had the most to say about living and loving in the world. He orders the letters into sections which begin with his title and are followed by a line from Rilke.

1) On LIfe and Living You have to live life to the limit
2) On Being with others To be a Part, that is Fulfillment for us
3)On Work: Get up Cheerfully on Days You have to Work
4) On Difficulty and Adversity The Measure by which we may know our Strength
5)On Childhood and Education; This Joy in Daily Discovery
6) On Nature It Knows Nothing of Us
7)On Solitude The Lonest People Above all Contribute Most to Commonality
8)On Illness and Recovery Pain Tolerates No Interpretation
9)On Loss, Dying and Death Even Time Does not 'Console' It puts things in Place and creates Order
10) On Language That Vast, Humming and Swinging Syntax
11)On Art Art Presents Itself as a Way of Life
12) On Faith A Direction of the Heart
13) On Goodness and Morality Nothing Good, Once it Has Come into Existence May be Suppressed
14) On Love There is no Force in the World but Love

In his rich repetitive introduction to the volume Baer discusses the special place letter-writing had in Rilke's life and work. Rilke in his letters has a spontaneity and poetic freedom beyond that in his very disciplined and exacting poems. But of course the themes of both forms of writing are common ones, and the letters a source of ideas and inspirations for the Poetry. What distinguishes the Letters from another form Rilke used to great advantage ' the Diary' is the consciousness of the 'you' at the other end.
Baer suggests one particular strength of Rilke's writing in the Letters is his nuanced awareness of the person at the other end, and his ability to reach out and feel and know how to express a message which will resonate in the heart of the recipient.
Baer gives a picture of Rilke the legendary Poet- waiting for the fruit to ripen ,as most notably in the great period in which he suddenly in weeks time wrote the 'Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Orpheus'- in contrast to the daily workman letter-writing Rilke. Baer underlines that Rilke expresses in the letters his own rare and special vision of life, one which conjoins the everyday with the cosmic, which feels in the rhythms of rhyme our inner rhythm of biology and mind, which senses in its internalization of the worlds objects a fullness of being and lived life. Baer presents the picture of a poet of holy immanence whose idea of the aesthetic is not in the pretty only, but who forges and finds beauty in the ugly aspects of reality also.
Baer also tells the not always admirable tale of Rilke's personal life, the marriage to Clara Westhoff, the birth of their sole daughter Ruth, Rilke's abandonment of them, his seeking out his own fate but not without his fawning at aristocratic patrons, his love of love but often cruel abandonment of those loved, his loyalty to his own faith and vocation as poet, his apprentice- admiring relationship with Rodin and wisdom in being free of it, his great fame. And what is in a way most touching his keeping in touch through the letters as he deepened into a solitude which for him was far more blessing than curse.
It seems there now is a fashion started perhaps by Alain de Botton with his volume on Proust, of selecting out from the total work of great literary creators passages best encapsulating their wisdom and vision of life.
Many of the statements of this volume may seem exaggerated and in need of qualification. Yet even these statements are richly poetically suggestive. The work of a great poet for whom ripeness is within, and richness in feeling infuses all.

" The strings of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them also at a later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete."

"I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion. It is in this spirit of unchecked admiration that the few great individuals whom our time was unable to stifle ought to be presented, precisely because ourage has become so very good at assuming a critical stance."

"After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and faces than we do."

How did I live this long without the wisdom of Rilke? Recommended to me by a poet, this unusual volume is really two books in one. Ulrich's Baer's extensive introduction itself is a work of great subtlety and wisdom. He presents Rilke as a complex figure whose romantic image is at variance with his deep commitment to mindfulness and rigorous self-examination. Then there is Rilke himself relentlessly holding us to the originality and delicious upredictability of our fate. Every writer should have this volume in their personal library.
Paul Gilbert, Jr.