In the translation I have, on each page that precedes a new chapter, is a line drawing that depicts some moment or encounter that is crucial to the action that follows.
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That poem shows, if nothing else, I think, how a belief in the efficacy of prayer, or whatever name you might give to the more noble attempts to communicate with the divine (from a position of humility, but not mere desperation), can orient a person to reality in such a way that they are able to inhabit each moment honestly, with the entirety of their being, and a readiness that is surprisingly rare, considering how many souls pass into and out of existence.
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If you spend some time with that epic poem of antiquity, The Odyssey, you’ll notice the ease with which the mortals in that narrative will address themselves to the gods, in supplication and in gratitude, as if doing so was no less natural to them than speaking to one another. And that everything in creation seems capable to them of auguring something else. Which I do not cite as evidence of the existence of a divinity (let alone a pantheon), for the poem does not function as such, but only as evidence of the fact that the culture into which it was orated, and allowed to circulate, was disposed to the receiving of that idea. By which I mean that the work could be taken seriously by its listeners, and understood as a dramatization of a relationship that a large portion of its audience would’ve felt to be true, if only allegorically, because, I suspect, that audience hadn’t been plunged, as we moderns have, into an atmosphere that pays nothing but lip service to the religious imagination.
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For every soul has an inclination for prayer, which is really no more than a desire to communicate with the divine, and if a particular soul no longer feels the inclination, that’s because the inclination has been subjected so long to the energies of cynicism that it would seem to have been extinguished.
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That thing isn’t prayer, exactly, but it is near to prayer, and is perhaps the condition from which prayer will arise if its continuance isn’t discouraged.
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And yet, conversely, it doesn’t mean that the beloved wants to exist at a remove from the person who loves them, as if in spiritual coldness, but only that, because the journey of each soul has an interior element (even when we are always involved with visible reality, and some corner of its materiality), each soul, on occasion, will want to dwell on something that is theirs alone on which to dwell and understand, and that is precious enough to them that love should recognize it as something for which they, the beloved, should be given privacy, and on which love should not intrude.
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Which isn’t to say that love isn’t willing to pour itself out for the sake of the beloved, or that it keeps track of its own apportioning, as if there were an amount of itself that it should be willing to give, and beyond that no more, but only that it recognizes that the separateness of all things means that each thing, in its relation to each other thing and to the divine, has a privacy that love will honor by acknowledging and keeping in sight, and in the context of which it will modulate its expression.
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In other words, there is the love that will moderate the expressions and inroads of its affection, out of respect for what it knows to be the boundaries of its own separateness, with regard to that of its beloved, so that the beloved, while not neglected or ignored, can dwell in the privacy that, native to them, is necessary for their growth, and is even divinely wrought; and then there is the love that, while often well-intended, and maybe even the beginning of something vital, is not really love (or not yet love), insofar as it extends itself, with reckless enthusiasm, and a desire to be assured of its own utility, beyond its domain, until it invades the space where the spirit of the beloved (silent even to the beloved themself) would sit in contemplation of itself.
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Which, needless to say, he did not mean as a defense of the sort of secrecy that manifests as lies or deception, and that a person might inflict on their beloved, and then hide or obscure, due to a narrowness of spirit, or a lack of courage, or a refusal to open themself to whatever reaction, spontaneously elicited, and rightly warranted, might require them to witness the extent of the injury their furtiveness will have caused, and then to make amends for it (if amends are possible); but of that existential secrecy that involves not our morality, nor any deeds we may or may not do, but our very being, our inmost life, our identity that belonged to us before we were named, and of which everyone, at all times, is in possession, so that each of us, in some way, is unknowable, even to our most cherished friends, though not, perhaps, to ourselves and to God.
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Thomas Merton understood this also, when he wrote, in No Man Is an Island, “If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him: it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his.”
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And the measure of the bond between two lovers as the extent to which they each “stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
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Which is why, I think, Rilke chose to describe love as existing between “two solitudes.”
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It might even be said that an awareness of one’s solitude, and a safeguarding of it, is a necessary condition by which love can reveal its value. For it is in the desert of our solitude, and not in the noise of those elements of civilization that would have us see nothing of beauty in a desert (as there is nothing there to commodify, nothing to be bought and sold), that the values by which we would persist, in defiance of an existential meaninglessness, are to be found, and shaped, and made vital.
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Though to the extent that an individual can manifest, feel, and reciprocate love, that solitude need not be tragic.
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The consequences of which solitude, insofar as an individual is sometimes unable to tolerate the loneliness that it can produce, or is unable to find, in communion with their fellows, a way by which to ameliorate it, or honor it, can seem tragic.
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It is this inwardness, anyway (which I think is present in all art, in one form or another), that speaks to the essential solitude of our existence, even if that solitude, at the level of the individual, can be lived in the company of others.
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In other words, it is often an artwork’s inward life (which will float off into a territory of implication that is larger than the artwork itself) that is more profound than its outward arrangements. Though it is true that, without those arrangements (or when those arrangements are artlessly rendered), the inwardness isn’t achieved, isn’t given any substance.
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When nothing of the work resists apprehension, then the work can be said to be unrealized in another way, wherein it would inhabit a place of polarity to obfuscation, which is to say that the work would be limpid, or free of ambiguity, which is a virtue in some forms of communication, but not in the form of communication that means to be art.
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For the difference between an artwork that is realized, and that can be said to transport its audience, and an artwork that is not, is the extent to which those aspects of it that resist an audience’s apprehension create mystery rather than obfuscation.
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The reason being, I think, that such a bounding off, or containing, gives the imagination of the audience liberty to play, but not so much liberty that the imagination is at a loss as to where to begin to play, and on what grounds, and within what mood.