Duino Elegies

First Elegy

• “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”

• “Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”

  • Interpreted. Drawn away from the purity of direct experience.
• “Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.”
• “But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself, as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.”
• “But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who are you?”
• “But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume…Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food…Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves, or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well?”

• “Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted with what alone endures; and we would stand there in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy… Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him in his constellation and puts the measuring rod of distance in his hand?”

  • From infinite space to finite space (measuring rod): loss of innocence
• “Even the most visible happiness can’t reveal itself to us until we transform it, within.”

• “Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was, now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power, formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth. Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before- just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.”

  • Incredible. The world being within rather than without. Our building the world without, externals, concepts, formless energy wrested from the earth.
• “Like an outstretched arm is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up to seize, remains in front of you, open as if in defense and warning, Ungraspable One, far above.”

• “With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. We know what is really out there only from the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects—not the Open, which is so deep in animals’ faces. … the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.”

  • The inward look, which conceptualizes the world; denatures Nature. The animal, on the other hand, has a pure, non-conceptual relationship with the world.
• “But [the animal] feels its life as boundless, unfathomable, and without regard to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze. And where we see the future, it sees all time and itself within all time, forever healed.”
• “And how bewildered is any womb-born creature that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.”

• “And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward. It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.”

  • Reminds of Einsof. Kabbalistic creation myth.
• When someone travels to the mountains, he brings not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word, some story, he gained. “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain…But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing.”
• “Let my joyfully streaming face make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year—, not only a season in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.”

• “And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.”

  • Like the “raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.”

Sonnets to Orpheus

• “But you now, dear girl, whom I loved like a flower whose name I didn’t know.”
• “And not any less transforming than the deep intuition that wins us over without a sound like a quietly playing child of an infinite union.”

[X, part 2]

All we have gained the machine threatens, as long as it dares to exist in the mind and not in obedience.

To dim the masterful hand’s more glorious lingering, for the determined structure it more rigidly cuts the stones.

Nowhere does it stay behind; we cannot escape it at last as it rules, self-guided, self-oiled, from its silent factory.

It thinks it is life: thinks it does everything best, though with equal determination it can create or destroy.

But still, existence for us is a miracle; in a hundred places it is still the source. A playing of absolute forces that no one can touch who has not knelt down in

wonder.

Still there are words that can calmly approach the unsayable…

And from the most tremulous stones music, forever new, builds in unusable space her deified temple.

• “When the mind stays serene, whatever happens to us is good.”

[XII]

He who pours himself out like a stream is acknowledged at last by Knowledge;

and she leads him enchanted through the harmonious country

that finishes often with starting, and with ending begins.

…is a child or grandchild of parting. And the transfigured

as she feels herself become laurel, wants you to change into

wind.

Appendix

[II]

The New, my friends, is not a matter of

letting machines force out our handiwork.

Don’t be confused by change; soon those who have

praised the “New” will realize their mistake.

For look, the Whole is infinitely newer

than a cable or a high apartment house.

The stars keep blazing with an ancient fire,

and all more recent fires will fade out.

Not even the longest, strongest of transmissions

can turn the wheels of what will be.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.

More than we experienced has gone by.

And the future holds the most remote event in union with what we most deeply want.

[VIII]

…

The water is strange and the water is yours,

from here and from far below.

You are the fountain-stone, unawares,

and all Things are mirrored in you.

…

Your task is to love what you don’t understand.

It grips your most secret emotion, and

rushes away with it. Where?

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