[T]his hollow-eyed communer with angels, Greek torsos and death was not merely a selfish snob;
    he was also an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to
    go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who
    almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for
    his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo,
    and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because
    he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.
        -Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World review of Life of a Poet : Rainer Maria Rilke  By Ralph Freedman

Loving another does not entitle one to their love in return, but being loved by another does place one under an obligation.  This is the awful truth that Rainer Maria Rilke's semi autobiographical hero, Malte Laurids Brigge, seems to be trying to evade.  In fact, this is very much the dilemma of modern man, for no matter how much we love God, our love will not necessarily influence Him, but His love for us places us under an obligation to Him.  Of course, the easiest way out of this dilemma is simply to deny the existence of God, which has been the response of Modernity.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the problem of fellow humans, and the obligations that their love puts us under.  Thus, Rilke, who wrote the book after running away from his wife and young child, says of Brigge :

    [H]e had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved.

Or, as Sartre more famously said :

    Hell is other people.

Both quotes reflect an understanding that love ultimately places limits on human freedom, by creating interdependence.

Brigge's/Rilke's reaction, one which has been all to common in our age, was to turn completely inward and become totally self-absorbed, to disregard others.  And in the absence of God and of other people what is the central fact of the self ?  Mortality.  So it is little surprise that an obsession with death thoroughly permeates the Notebooks.  If you really want to read about an effete and morbidly self-centered intellectual who is down and out in Paris (of course Paris), this is the book for you.

But if you don't share in the pathologies, it's likely to be off-putting, at least it was for me.  Reviews all seem to mention the beauty of Rilke's language, but it didn't strike me as particularly lovely.  It certainly does not redeem the depressing story.  Rilke's concerns are those you would expect of the man that Michael Dirda describes above : only his own unpleasant self.  In the end the book is mainly interesting as an influential expression of a philosophy of mere existence that has proven enormously damaging, contributing mightily to the unfortunate atomization of humanity in the 20th Century.

(Reviewed:22-Sep-01)

Grade: (D) Orrin C. Judd

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