O in-between land

13 December, at night

If every death (like every life) has been allotted a certain portion of time, then days like the last ones will have to be counted up and deducted by its sum. For they are days spent beneath the earth, days in dampness and decay. But that’s so Christian a stratagem: to turn everything unbearable into consolation, it’s the oldest philosophy in Christendom- and deep down I can’t subscribe to it. I fear that such days don’t belong to Death, just as they don’t belong to Life. They belong…O in-between land, if an in-between Spirit presides over you, an in-between God, then they belong to him, this concealed uncanny one. For this is what he wants. Such stretches of hopelessness, such gaspings of the soul. And should they once not recede, not come to an end, not cast away, not suddenly become untrue: if one had to name all this “I”, this unspeakably disconnected, helplessly isolated consciousness that, cut off from the voices of silence, falls into itself as into an empty well, as into the depths of a pool that contains stagnant water and animals gestating in muck. What is one then? Who knows how many afflicted with this in-between existence live in lunatic asylums and die there. And it is so frighteningly easy to die in this state. It is dying itself. The growing indifferent and the balancing with the weight of one’s own inertia an opposite pan full of doubts and putrescences. What good are the efforts one makes ever more sluggishly, ever more wearily, ever more laboriously, like voices of opposition growing fainter-won over by disgust? One’s will is there… but it is like a piece of conduit that has hit rock. One tries: uprisings, ascents, one wants to get moving, one stands for a while, and it all comes to this: one lies down, lies down and is content to lift one’s head just high enough to see what is standing nearby – people and things. One becomes ever so humble, humble to the point of baseness. Humble like a dog with a guilty conscience. Flat, without feeling and filled only with fear, fear of everything that does and does not happen, of what exists and of any change in what one can scarcely bear. Out of distrust one flatters. Crawls before every accident of the day, receives it like a guest one has been expecting for weeks, praises it, is disappointed by its scowl, seeks to hide the disappointment, seeks to erase it inside oneself, to deny it to oneself, deceives oneself, while one has already been deceived as it is, digs oneself deeper and deeper into confusions and lunacy, has dreams, wakens, wishes for an inheritance, a prince’s title, fame, poverty and omnipotence, all at the same time, judges the value of everything now like a child by its golden glitter, now like a whore by profit and pleasure and night-is invaded by everything that happens, is screamed at by all the trivialities and obscenities of the day as by drunken gendarmes, takes up with a riffraff of ideas, drinks, gets drunk on muck, rolls around on stones, goes soiled in the company of cherished memories, drips dirt on consecrated pathways, takes things piety has kept untouched into one’s sticky, sweaty, swollen hands, makes everything common, held in common, common fiat. Pasts fall into impure fire, futures consume themselves in the womb of ill-used hours, put up a struggle, die. And only the unspeakable happens. Deluge and sin’s malediction. And this again and again. And afterward living on again, undisturbed and not astonished? And no to think about the fact that it will all lie before you again the very moment you have overcome it…(no, not so proud a word as “overcome”), that the very moment it has grown shallow, has been left behind, and you start to feel the sand drying beneath your feet, it rises again and grows warm. God presides over Life and over Death. But he has no dominion over the in-between land, it exists in spite of his power and presence, has no space, no time, no eternity. Has only heartbeats of unspeakably sorrowful hearts suspended high up and frightened, unaware of one another, deprived of all relations and connections, switched off, without meaning, their beating possessing as little truth and reality as the royal proclamation delivered by a lunatic in a straightjacket before crassly laughing guards and frightened inmates…This had to be written as a sign of myself. God help me.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)