Life Over Death
Yesterday I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel written by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Brigge is a young man living in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century; he is Danish, poor, aristocratic and poetic but the most salient feature of Brigge is that he is encompassed by depression. He is one seriously bummed-out guy and there is nothing that can cheer him up. Not music: he complains that while “it lifted me out of myself more powerfully than anything else”, it also “never put me back where it had found me, but lower down, somewhere deep in the uncompleted.” Not springtime; Brigge castigates himself for finding the “bursting year” to be “a reproach…The garden was beginning but you…you dragged winter into it….a bird rang out and was alone and denied you…Ah, should you have been dead?” Not books: “you didn’t have the right to open one book unless you were prepared to read them all.” Not even Paris; Brigge’s first sentence is, “So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.” And women? Women are a complete mystery he just does not understand.
Brigge’s obsession is death, scarred as he has been by the early death of his mother, the more recent death of his father, the un-death of a certain relative (ghostly Christine) and the loss of his true love, Abelone. Brigge has some very interesting ideas about death, for example that we all carry within us the fact of our death and it is fruition of this fact that is life’s purpose. Cheerful, yes? He imagines how compelling is the vision of the pregnant women stroking their bellies “in which there were two fruits: a child and death.” Cheerful, no.
Brigge has given up on looking forward: “Just one step, and my misery would turn into bliss. But I can’t take that step; I have fallen and I can’t pick myself back up.” Instead, he looks backward, sifting through childhood memories and looking for answers about love, life, and — yes — doden (death in Danish). The only consolation to Brigge is the memory of Venice; his writings about Venice even approach a kind of bliss, “Beautiful counterweight of the world, which, down to its very ornaments, stands full of latent energies that spread out like finer and finer nerves…this Venice.” The only consolation to the reader of Brigge’s notebooks is that depressed as he is, he will not kill himself: “The main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.” Life, even steeped in depression, is better than death.
I like Rilke’s poems about life extending its reign over death more than I liked this novel.
We know nothing of this going away, that
shares nothing with us. We have no reason,
whether astonishment and love or hate,
to display Death, whom a fantastic mask
of tragic lament astonishingly disfigures.
Now the world is still full of roles which we play
as long as we make sure, that, like it or not,
Death plays, too, although he does not please us.
But when you left, a strip of reality broke
upon the stage through the very opening
through which you vanished: Green, true green,
true sunshine, true forest.
We continue our play. Picking up gestures
now and then, and anxiously reciting
that which was difficult to learn; but your far away,
removed out of our performance existence,
sometimes overcomes us, as an awareness
descending upon us of this very reality,
so that for a while we play Life
rapturously, not thinking of any applause.
This poem, entitled “Death Experience”, holds more in its five stanzas than poor Brigge can approach in the 257 pages of his notebooks.
