duino-elegies: Rilke canvas from Myopicpoets
“Have I mentioned already that I am learning to see? Yes, I am making a start. I have not made much progress yet, but I mean to make the most of my time. To think, for example, that I have never consciously registered just how many faces there are. There are a great many people, but there are a great many more faces, for every person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years on end; naturally it shows signs of wear, it gets dirty, it cracks at the creases, it splays out like gloves worn on a journey. These are simple people, practicing economies, and they do not change their face or even have it cleaned. It’ll do fine, they insist, and who is to prove them wrong? The question, of course, since they have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face. Other people are disconcertingly quick to change their faces, one after another, and they wear them out. At first they suppose they have enough to last for ever, but hardly have they reached forty when they come to the last of them. There is of course a tragic side to this. They are not used to looking after their faces; the last is worn out in a week, holed and paper-thin in numerous places, and little by little the underlay shows through, the non-face, and they go about wearing that. But that woman, that woman: she was wholly immersed within herself, bowed forward, head in hands. It was at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her, I began to tread softly. The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thought. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them. The street was too deserted, its emptiness was wearied with itself and pulled out the footfall from under my feet and banged it about as if it were knocking a wooden clog. The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.” The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) - Rainer Maria Rilke (Picture courtesy of Knud Odde.)
duino-elegies: Postcard from Rainer Maria Rilke to Franziska zu Reventlow (source)
duino-elegies: Church in Raron (Switzerland) next to Rainer Maria Rilke’s grave (by Mind & Brain on Flickr)
stillpatientopen: Rainer Maria Rilke, Lament
duino-elegies: Helmut Westhoff, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1901