Name: laila's review of The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke
Item: The Dark Interval
Rating: 4
Author: laila

Rainer Maria Rilke

From the writer of the classic Letters to a Young Poet, reflections on grief and loss, collected and published here in one volume for the first time. “A great poet’s reflections on our greatest mystery.”—Billy Collins “A treasure . . . The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and necessary.”—The Guardian Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke’s voluminous, never-before-translated letters to bereaved friends and acquaintances, The Dark Interval is a profound vision of the mourning process and a meditation on death’s place in our lives. Following the format of Letters to a Young Poet, this book arranges Rilke’s letters into an uninterrupted sequence, showcasing the full range of the great author’s thoughts on death and dying, as well as his sensitive and moving expressions of consolation and condolence. Presented with care and authority by master translator Ulrich Baer, The Dark Interval is a literary treasure, an indispensable resource for anyone searching for solace, comfort, and meaning in a time of grief. Praise for The Dark Interval “Even though each of these letters of condolence is personalized with intimate detail, together they hammer home Rilke’s remarkable truth about the death of another: that the pain of it can force us into a ‘deeper . . . level of life’ and render us more ‘vibrant.’ Here we have a great poet’s reflections on our greatest mystery.”—Billy Collins “As we live our lives, it is possible to feel not sadness or melancholy but a rush of power as the life of others passes into us. This rhapsodic volume teaches us that death is not a negation but a deepening experience in the onslaught of existence. What a wise and victorious book!”—Henri Cole

Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

The Dark Interval

There should be no fear that we are not strong enough to endure any and even the closest and most horrible experience of death. Death is not beyond our strength, it is the highest mark etched at the vessel’s rim: We are full whenever we reach it, and being full means (for us) a feeling of heaviness, that something is difficult…that is all.—I do not mean to say that one should love death. But one should love life so generously and without calculating and selecting that one automatically always includes it (the half turned away from life) in one’s love, too.

that the warmth of accomplishing something each day lets you experience a new degree of feeling alive

Whatever had such steady influence on us had already been a reality independent of all the circumstances familiar to us here. This is precisely why we experienced it as something so different and independent of an actual need: Because from the very beginning, it had no longer been aimed at and determined by our existence here.

All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.

For already the most fleeting experience of true possession (or of having something in common with another person, which is after all only double possession) flings us back into ourselves with such enormous force and requires so much of us to do there, and demands such extremely solitary development, that it would be enough to keep all of us occupied individually forever.

Today, my attitude toward death is that it frightens me more in those whom I failed to truly encounter and who remained inexplicable or disastrous to me, than it does in those whom I loved with certainty when they were alive, even if they burst only for a brief moment into the radiant transfiguration of intimacy which love can reach.

And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, beautiful one. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms. Finally: happy.

From one of the most famous poets in history comes a new selection of writings to bereaved friends and acquaintances, providing comfort in a time of grief and words to soothe the soul. 'A treasure. The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and necessary' OBSERVER Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke addressed letters to individuals who were close to him, who had contacted him after reading his works, or who he had met briefly – anyone with whom he felt an inner connection. Within his vast correspondence, there are about two dozen letters of condolence. In these direct, personal and practical letters, Rilke writes about loss and mortality, assuming the role of a sensitive, serious and uplifting guide through life's difficulties. He consoles a friend on the loss of her nephew, which she experienced like the loss of her own child; a mentor on the death of her dog; and an acquaintance struggling to cope with the end of a friendship. The result is a profound vision of mourning and a meditation on the role of pain in our lives, as well as a soothing guide for how to get through it. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation...

Letters for the Grieving Heart

Laura Mei

But even we ourselves, in our longing for a beyond away from here, become in that process less concrete and less earthbound, while it is our obligation — as long as we are here and related to tree, flower, and soil — to remain earthbound in the purest sense. Just like the moon, life surely has a side that is permanently turned away from us, and which is not its opposite but its complement to attain perfection, consummation, and the truly complete and round sphere and orb of being. There should be no fear that we are not strong enough to endure any and even the closest and most horrible experience of death. Death is not beyond our strength, it is the highest mark etched at the vessel’s rim: We are full whenever we reach it, and being full means (for us) a feeling of heaviness, that something is difficult…that is all. I do not mean to say that one should love death. But one should love life so generously and without calculating and selecting that one automatically always includes it (the half turned away from life) in one’s love, too. All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.

Where each of us may find the sources of consolation when thus afflicted by a loss is a question of personal experience and fate. I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. This pain in particular allows the most personal and sweetest consolation to come to ripen for us: The greatest, nearest, and most pressing human loss in particular shelters the fruit of consolation most reliably. Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off — it reveals itself for those who can trust it, in spite of its overwhelming and dire appearance, as a kind of initiation. By way of loss, by way of such vast and immeasurable experiences of loss, we are quite powerfully introduced into the whole.

One must let life run its course. The human being destroys so many things on his own, and it is not in his power to restore anything. Nature, by contrast, has all the power to heal as long one does not eavesdrop or interrupt it. It still seems to me the most wonderful thing in life that the blunt and rough nature of any intrusion and even an obvious disturbance can become the occasion to create a new order within ourselves. The worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.

But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you.I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.

No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.

maia

The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.

But death is so deeply rooted in the nature of love (if we only become cognizant of death without being misled by the ugliness and suspicions attached to it) that it nowhere contradicts love.

But even we ourselves, in our longing for a beyond away from here, here, become in that process less concrete and less earthbound, while it is our obligation—as long as we are here and related to tree, flower, and soil—to remain earthbound in the purest sense, and even yet to become so! 

Time itself does not "console," as people say superficially; at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order.

Words...can they be words of consolation?— I am not sure about this, and I do not quite believe that one can or should be consoled for a loss as Sudden and great as the one you just suffered..

This pain in particular allows the most personal and sweetest consolation to come to ripen for us: The greatest, nearest, and most pressing human loss in particular shelters the fruit of consolation most reliably.

I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. For it is unthinkable that this ever possible, providential pain, which is so often aimed at and inflicted upon human beings, is inconsolable.

You are correct: We have been tasked with nothing as unconditionally as learning on a daily basis how to die. But our knowledge of death is enriched not by the refusal of life. It is only the ripe fruit of the here and now, when seized and bitten into, that spreads its indescribable flavor in us.

Death is such an indescribable, immeasurable value that God allows it to be inflicted on us at any time even in the most senseless manner, simply because he may not bestow anything greater on us.

What shouldn't a person be able to achieve with precisely the kind of force that is needed to dissolve the powerful, tremendous attachments of life! From that moment on I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.

The human being destroys so many things on his own, and it is not in his power to restore anything. Nature, by contrast, has all the power to heal as long one does not eavesdrop or interrupt it.

Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a Surviving individual, because its innermost essence is not contrary to us (as one may occasionally suspect), but it is more knowing about life than we are in Our most vital moments.

What I really would like to hear much more about at the right time is that knot of coincidences which, as you suggest, İs actually what keeps you confined in bodily pain.

Drue Thomas

laila

Jen Estrella

I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?) You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate = imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence.

Mayra Melo

Mica

Prashant Prasad

rilke gets it he just gets me 

“There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.”

Drue Thomas &
The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Drue Thomas &The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Drue Thomas &
The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke