[In the following essay, Garber employs Rilke's letters and personal history to illuminate the urban settings in his fiction.]

In a letter of 1924 to Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck, Rilke shapes out the contours of a Bewusstseinspyramide, a pyramid of consciousness which images for him the extent and dimensions of what we can know. At the point of the pyramid, he says, stands ordinary existence, but the base spreads deep within us until we move around in an area independent of time and space, an area where

uns das einfache Sein könnte zum Ereignis werden, jenes unverbrüchliche Vorhanden-Sein und Zugleich-Sein alles dessen, was an der oberen "normalen" Spitze des Selbstbewusstseins nur als "Ablauf zu erleben verstattet ist.¹

Rilke comments further that at the time of writing Malte he had been searching for a form "die Vergangenes und noch nicht Entstandenes einfach als Gegenwärtigkeit letzten Grades aufzufassen fähig wäre."² Obviously one has to be cautious about depending on the accuracy of post facto remarks of this sort, especially remarks made at so great a distance from the labor on Malte. But with these retrospective assertions Rilke moved closer to defining the order and import of the world of Malte Laurids Brigge than he did in other comments, some in passing and some more extended, on the notebook form or on the difficult problem of Malte's success in pulling himself back into coherence. A strange realism prompted Rilke to speak of the Aufzeichnungen as artistically, perhaps, a poor unity but humanly a possible one.³ Yet this view cannot account for the impressive symmetry of the novel or its overriding sense of direction, however much the presence or even the existence of a terminus may be brought into question. More useful and ultimately more successful is Rilke's own image of the pyramid pointed with the ordinary world.

As the letter of 1924 Maltes clear, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge takes at least part of its origin from Rilke's search for a form that could organize temporal dimensions into a seamless order, an order which, because all points in time are present in it at once, liberates the observer from the prison-house of an exclusively immediate time. Were this order to be achieved within any work, that work would have to show, formally, the simultaneous presence of all areas in time and, further, would probably Malte that search for order into a central theme in its own dramatic movement. There seems no question that Rilke attempted, in the Aufzeichnungen, to unify theme and form in this way. If there is a sense in which the book is autobiography (and I do not mean the relatively insignificant fact that certain of Malte's experiences happened to Rilke), that sense emerges in the recognition that both writer and hero were attempting the same thing, the unification of the varieties of temporal strata into an order which could clarify and give some meaning to the painful disparities in human experience. Rilke must have been aware of this similarity. He must also have seen the paradox that in the very process of telling Malte's story, he was trying to bring about a more successful version of the ordering his hero had failed to accomplish.

Despite what Rilke implies about the random nature of the notebook entries, the book sets immediately into focus not only the search for order but the mode in which the search is to be accomplished and, gradually and increasingly, the material which has to be ordered. The Aufzeichnungen, as we know, have roots in Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Jacobsen, and some aspects of the decadent nineties. The first entry locates Malte squarely in the center of a squalid city, the image which Baudelaire created once and for all for modern literature. This is part of what Malte must order. Two entries follow, the first an elaborate description of night sounds, to all of which Malte responds with frantic intensity, the next an awesome picture of a silence in which a sense of impending doom is figured through a wall about to crash down. With this background Rilke arranges a corner of Malte's untidy life, placing him here and now, in this city at this time in his own and the world's history. The first three entries, fervent in their involvement with sight, sound, and silence, show Malte's senses frenziedly at play, working to organize the materials of a world the very principles of which are alien to him but in which he must learn, somehow, to live. The mode of organization is vision: "Habe ich es schon gesagt? Ich lerne sehen. Ja, ich fange an. Es geht noch schlecht. Aber ich will meine Zeit ausnutzen."⁴ Here, then, are the beginnings of a content and the establishment of a mode, crude matter which has to be shaped and the definition of the process of shaping. Malte's work is the work of an artist, the seer as Malter trying to form coherence out of the chaos of impressions around him. But ironically and ominously, this artist has to learn his craft while he organizes material whose meaning to him he cannot yet understand. He will understand only after he has ordered it, that is, when he has mastered the mode and become the full visionary who can see where things belong and how they got there. Malte is, therefore, no passive hero: the activity of seeing absorbs and drives him from the immediate scene into a variety of difficult dimensions. (What he actually does comes somewhere between the compulsive passivity of Dostoevsky's Underground Man and the confused assertiveness of Raskolnikov.) The actions in the book are actions observed with all the intensity of one to whom the unknown order he is trying to Malte means coherence and life. From early to late, Malte is teaching himself to see; surely one of the more painful ironies of the novel is its quality as a Selbstbildungsroman.

The mode of seeing takes the form of a search for points of sight, images on which he can fasten and, once they are understood, from which he can move to others that have not yet been drawn into the order of his being. The pervasive concreteness of the Aufzeichnungen grows out of Malte's obsessive concern with things and actions, the facts of all the worlds he touches. He studies every object and event that comes into the periphery of his consciousness in order to find out what sort of ideas and patterns cluster around them, what they mean to themselves, to others, and, most important, to himself. Each image earns its full right to existence in his notes because it reveals something to him about what and where he is and has been. No fact is neutral for Malte, who has an eye for the minutiae of every kind of reality; each fact has a quality, a tone and color, and might have some relation to the order he is trying to shape. If the objects come at him too quickly when he looks at Paris or St. Petersburg, the images do drop eventually into place (probably without his full awareness but certainly with the reader's), and the city emerges as one great hospital. Paris is a place of sickness and corruption, a city only too real (cf. Eliot's "unreal city") where women come to be delivered only to have their infants grow fat and greenish with sores on their foreheads. Malte, like Hamlet, finds that imagery of decay and pollution defines most accurately the current stench of things, though with Malte the odor is not moral but psychological and metaphysical. Here is the modern landscape seen through the eyes of a figure out of another world. The city images the condition of the modern urbanized soul, a world not of the dead (that at least would be finished and bearable, perhaps even as beautiful as the mask of the drowned girl, la noyée), but of the nearly dead, those approaching extinction through some grotesque sickness which takes no account of their perishing individuality. The act of dying seems to frighten Malte more than the fact of death itself, partly because the change he is going through seems to him as radical in its shift of being as the act of dying, partly also because his fear of the loss of self sees that loss accomplished irrevocably as dying goes on. His tableaux parisiens grow gradually, thus, into a painfully coherent picture which echoes Baudelaire and prefigures T. S. Eliot. And, as with these poets, certain details of the city stand out from the others as seeing-points, images which, as he is learning to see, offer a special fascination because they embody the essential qualities of the city surrounding him: the woman with her face in her hands, the man with St. Vitus's dance, the flowers that stood up and said "red" in a frightened voice, the green covering of the armchair with the hollow in which innumerable heads had rested.

Rilke's skill in organizing the apparent disparateness of the notebook entries appears also with certain images which focus tentatively, with a strange combination of curiosity and dread, on some point of relationship with a fact out of Malte's past. Most obvious, of course, are the contrasted modes of dying to which Malte explicitly refers. But his instinct for survival sends him everywhere in search of contrasting images, some of which grow into and give substance to a variety of themes in the book. Indeed, contrasts, properly interpreted, shape a pattern and therefore an order, a kind of wholeness that can stabilize, if not entirely explain, how Malte gets to where he is. The hunt for images draws his apprehensive but meticulous eye into the most minute observations on Parisian street life and, perhaps many pages later, into finding a contrast and echo at another place, perhaps in another time when he and the world were newer and healthier.

Clothing, houses, illnesses—these especially cluster into patterns built on echoes ringing in time as well as space, echoes which cohere into the first notes of a harmony which Malte could never finish. The streets of Paris led him to a house or, more properly, to the wall of a house which was no longer there. Clinging to the wall were the obscenely frank remnants of the inside of the building, its intimate life whose objects draw him toward the edge of nausea: the water-closet pipe that wriggles like a stubbornly independent digestive tract, the spots on the wall which had kept their paint fresher because pictures or wardrobes had once covered them. The reek of the air surrounding the former tenants still lay on the wall, but most of all the life had never left:

Das zähe Leben dieser Zimmer hatte sich nicht zertreten lassen. Es war noch da, es hielt sich an den Nägeln, die geblieben waren, es stand auf dem handbreiten Rest der Fussböden, es war unter den Ansätzen der Ecken, wo es noch ein klein wenig Innenraum gab, zusammengekrochen.⁵

"Die Hauptsache," he had said in the first entry, "war, dass man lebte. Das war die Hauptsache."⁶ This wall which faces Malte has its exact, grotesque parallel in a sight he could not tolerate earlier, the woman at whom he could not stare because her face was in her hands and he could not bear to see the "blossen wunden Kopf ohne Gesicht."⁷ Now, here, with this wall that confronts him, he has to stare at the flayed inside of a house, forced against all his resistance into a repulsive intimacy with its parts and with the smell of its air. Paris catches up with Malte and compels him to stare at the secret writhings of its life.

But in the Aufzeichnungen there is still another house that isn't there, a house which offers another kind of parallel opening up further dimensions of Malte's life and defining the mode of organization he needs to work the multiple segments of his reality into a stable coherence. The burned-out house of the Schulins, which Malte had visited before and after the fire, retained its presence for those who knew it, and it came back suddenly and briefly into the lives of its former inhabitants and their visitors. It rises invisibly within them, absorbed into the depths of their consciousness. The life of this house, though, is the life of the Schulins, whose style of existence reveals a different kind of anxiety from the desperate clamminess exuded by the inhabitants of the house in Paris. The Schulins' nervousness comes from their presence at a moment of change in a life style, the destruction of the old order symbolized by the gutting of their ancestral home. Malte, like Yeats, finds a fascination in ancestral houses and sees them as dramatic symbols of the passing—the destruction by burning—of the old order and its way of life. All through Malte's notes there runs the theme of change, dramatized in this contrast of the houses and frequently elsewhere: as, for example, in the knitting of the end of Book I, the lady in the tapestries, with the beginning of Book II, the young girls who come to museums to sketch, having left their families and houses to live the life of the city. The elements of these contrasts, the houses and the women, are points of sight, images Malte lights upon during the education of his vision. To see these points as not disparate but related, and to be able to draw a line from one seeing-point to another, means that Malte has begun to Malte the rudiments of order in his world. With luck and struggle he can sometimes come to see that between two points a continuum stretches, a movement in time and space which embodies the change he senses everywhere. Malte has, himself, been part of such a movement; but to be within it is not necessarily to understand it—indeed, perhaps quite the opposite might result. Only the activity of seeing can show that there is, in fact, a continuum and not merely a bewildering leap.

The problems of change, then, come down not so much to acceptance (that would occur long after all the other elements in the process are accomplished) as the need to recognize and define continuity. In order to do this, Malte has to sort out and learn to live with a variety of contradictory impulses and phenomena that press in on him simultaneously, particularly the revelation of contemporary fact, the maturing and adjusting process of his own selfhood, and a dazed, rarely coherent or objectified sense of loss. He is certain only that there has been a point where something stopped, what for him is the end of a line: "Aber nun war der Jägermeister tot, und nicht er allein. Nun war das Herz durchbohrt, unser Herz, das Herz unseres Geschlechts. Nun war es vorbei. Das war also das Helmzerbrechen: 'Heute Brigge und nimmermehr', sagte etwas in mir."⁸ If Ulsgaard was an end, Paris is the new beginning. In fact, the hunting master had died in a strange city in unfamiliar surroundings, with Ulsgaard already gone. With an ironic overlap, the death had taken place in the new life. But Malte's own heart had already begun to do the shaping of continuity demanded by the new facts: "Es war ein einzelnes Herz. Es war schon dabei, von Anfang anzufangen."⁹

Out of this new beginning, impelled by it and in turn enriching it, comes Malte's complex sense of time and its manifold dimensions. What happened to Malte and the aristocratic culture he represents happened in time and (some would say) because of it. Thus, his impulse to turn to temporal questions is grounded in an accurate, instinctive grasp of the outline of his problems. He knows, for example, that any moment he can observe is both selfcontained, with its own difficult order, and also part of a process, the linear movement of time from one point to another, a process whose order is not at all apparent and which he must therefore learn to see. Each moment is a child of history and Malte becomes a genealogist, searching its lineal descent. Clearly involved with this problem, though—and Malte has some awareness of the involvement—is his current condition and its oppressive lack of order. His life seems fragmented and his self is apparently discontinuous. If he were to Malte sense out of the movement of his life from Ulsgaard to Paris, he would then be able to perceive it in sequential time, the measured movement from one temporal location to another. This, in turn, would Malte it possible for the movement to be comprehended in narrative form, the imaginative embodiment of the sense of time as an unfolding, coherent, and linear sequence, with no irrational leaps, no unexplained hiatuses. This is not to say that Malte wanted to write a novel about his life but that, as a writer, he was drawn initially toward the idea of time as linear sequence because of the relation of that aspect of time to narrative form. The impulse to draw lines between such seeing-points as the Schulin house and the house in Paris was an effort to overcome discontinuity in the manner most meaningful to him. Both Rilke and his hero sensed the relation of the order of the world and the order of art. But where Malte shores up fragments against his ruins, the fragments are disconnected for him and not for Rilke, who can see the movement and the order of the whole. As we shall see subsequently, though, another mode of understanding the shape of time, a mode opposed to the linear because it sought for simultaneity, was implicit in Malte's efforts. In his inability to reconcile the modes, indeed in his failure to accomplish them both, lay much of Malte's tragedy.

Drawn as always into the lives of others, Malte senses that even if he is not yet ready to write, and therefore to embody sequential time in narrative form, he can turn to another field of exploration, history, to which a similar approach would be possible. History, he knows, is another and potentially less subjective version of the experience and objectification of time as linear movement. His explorations, then, offer at least the possibility that he might be able to work around in the past in order to discover what it knew, to see its shape, that is, and to learn what he can from that. Further, in Malte's concern with history lies one of the central ordering patterns within the fragments: here, as elsewhere, theme and form reflect each other in the Aufzeichnungen. What Rilke has done is, first, to establish Malte's search for his role in contemporary urban phenomena and then send him back into history in order to find out what might help to clarify the meaning of things right now. Much of Part One and several entries in Part Two deal specifically with Malte's turn to the history closest to him, his own life in Ulsgaard and that of others allied to him in time and place. With varying degrees of success he attempts to look upon himself and those who were around him as he would look at historical figures. This is what he means by beginning at the beginning. The first attempts to move even further back in time occur with figures close to the history of his own family, such as his mother's sister Ingeborg, his grandmother Margaret Brigge, who had been betrothed to Felix Lichnowski, and, of course, the ghost who appears where she has every right to be, Christine Brahe. Some of these figures, such as Saint-Germain and Christine, serve as images of transition, connected both to Malte's private history (in the form of the history of his family) and also to the larger history of their times. The figures focus that overall movement in the Aufzeichnungen which goes from the personal to the public, from Malte's life to the life of his ancestors and then to that of Europe in general. Malte believes that only in these terms and with this kind of expanding development can he understand the full meaning of the decline of aristocracy—not that he comes to any other conclusion than that astonishing figures appeared now and then in his family and all through Europe.

Time, thus, becomes a mode of seeing for Malte, and in so doing it establishes one of the more curious paradoxes in this book of multiple truths. For, aware as he is that time is a process whose major result is the flux which has brought him to this pass, Malte still manages, with some success, to use time as an instrument with which he can probe his own concerns. Of the first element in the paradox, time as incessant and irrevocable movement, Malte is so aware that he can indulge in a rare, brilliantly grotesque self-parody in the story of the obsessions of Nikolaj Kusmitsch. Obviously influenced by Dostoevsky's Double, this episode mocks the idea of time as money—Kusmitsch, we remember, looked in the directory for a Time Bank—but it also shows Kusmitsch so horrified at his growing sense of time as hurried flux that he can feel the earth turning under him and the seconds passing like wind blowing on his face. With a piercingly accurate irony Malte tells of Nikolaj going to bed and reciting a poem with emphatically regular rhythmical stresses so that the order of art can conquer the flux of time:

Und dann hatte er sich das ausgedacht mit den Gedichten. Man sollte nicht glauben, wie das half. Wenn man so ein Gedicht langsam hersagte, mit gleichmässiger Betonung der Endreime, dann war gewissermassen etwas Stabiles da, worauf man sehen konnte, innerlich versteht sich.¹⁰

Malte knows that Nikolaj's madness can be his own and that Nikolaj's fate is a bizarre but precise dramatization of his own obsessions:

Ich erinnere mich dieser Geschichte so genau, weil sie mich ungemein beruhigte. Ich kann wohl sagen, ich habe nie wieder einen so angenehmen Nachbar gehabt, wie diesen Nikolaj Kusmitsch, der sicher auch mich bewundert hätte.¹¹

But if time and its anxieties force the figure of Nikolaj Kusmitsch into a bitter role in Malte's self-exploration, the other element in this paradox—time as a tool of awareness—brings other characters more positively within the periphery of his concerns. Rilke's extraordinarily sensitive understanding of other times and places affords him the opportunity of sending Malte back into history to look for other means by which he can organize his immediate difficulties. Rilke's compassion and insight combine with his deft craftsmanship to bring other periods and their people into vivid, present life, drawing into an elaborately depicted historical present some striking personage out of the past, setting that character in motion again on his own stage, and all this always with some comparison with Malte implicit in the meaning of his actions. Malte's move from personal to European history Maltes it possible for Rilke to bring the past into immediate being and at the same time to set up foils and doubles for his agonized hero.

For example, a figure like Grischa Otrepjow, the False Czar, fascinates Malte for a number of reasons. Grischa is an impostor who builds a mask in which he himself almost believes. Glorying in all the possibilities of self open for his experimentation, Grischa lives out a role which explores the manifold shapes a mask can take, and in this he is encouraged by the people: "Das Volk, das sich ihn erwünschte, ohne sich einen vorzustellen, machte ihn nur noch freier und unbegrenzter in seinen Möglichkeiten."¹² The relation to Malte's concerns with the establishment of a coherent self are obvious, as is Grischa's version of the idea of the mask, which always fascinated Malte even as it terrified him with the possibility of the loss of all identity. He admires in Grischa the courage which can take on voluntarily the dangerous task of building another self. (Duse had impressed him for much the same reason.) But Grischa means even more than this to Malte; other themes in the Aufzeichnungen weave in and out of the episode on the False Czar: Malte's speculations about Grischa's motivation prefigure the story of the Prodigal Son while simultaneously echoing the earlier passage on the girls in the museum:

Ich bin nicht abgeneigt zu glauben, die Kraft seiner Verwandlung hätte darin beruht, niemandes Sohn mehr zu sein. (Das ist schliesslich die Kraft aller jungen Leute, die fortgegangen sind.)¹³

Malte stares into history and finds even in the person of the mad Charles the Sixth of France some aspect of himself, for the king "begriff, dass die wahre Konsolation erst begann, wenn das Glück vergangen genug und für immer vorüber war."¹⁴ In history as well as in Paris, Malte studies ugliness, death, and love, all these themes and more, in terms of the fate of individual lives. When Paris repels it is because of the people there, what they are and go through. History fascinates because of the people he sees in it, the extraordinary personalities to which he, as old Count Brahe, was especially susceptible. When Brahe said of Saint-Germain that "Ich konnte damals natürlich nicht beurteilen, ob er geistreich war und das und dies, worauf Wert gelegt wird—: aber er war,"¹⁵ he shows that same awed sense of a grand presence of self that Malte experienced in the evocation of these historical personalities. The historical scenes in the Aufzeichnungen are triumphs of Rilke's ability to imagine himself into the center of another's being, to explore and objectify with absolute convincingness what it must have felt like to be what that being was. His profound empathy with these figures out of the past prefigures the mode of the Neue Gedichte which were to follow.

For Malte, though, the excursions into history ultimately convince him that even for these figures time seemed to be inexorably linear and therefore deadly. Linear time is death time, and an awesome personality serves, finally, to ensure a spectacular demise or an impressive corpse like that of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, whose cleft skull still commanded an imposingly dressed cadaver, but a cadaver nevertheless. The difficulty was not so much in overcoming the inevitability of flux, since Malte saw no way out of that, as in finding a means of coming to terms with it that would Malte sequence more tolerable if no less fatal.

In a way, Malte's turn back into his own and Europe's history had been part of an effort to Malte peace with linear time. For Western man generally, time has usually been linear, whether in the progression from an old to a new Eden charted in the Judaeo-Christian Bible, or in an epic like the Odyssey, which ends at an old home but with a hero much older than when he had left it. Malte is no Odysseus but neither is he an orthodox Christian with his eyes fixed ecstatically on the New Jerusalem to which time is implacably driving him. What Malte can draw on, though, that neither Biblical nor Hellenic man had available, was a sense of the unconscious as the lair of memory, and therefore a conception of the past as always present and potentially immediate under circumstances which could bring it out. Malte, as modern man, is unceasingly aware of the realities, ugly perhaps but present nevertheless, which lie within him gathering strength until some accident drives them up to the surface and out into the light again:

Mit einer somnambulen Sicherheit holt sie [diese Krankheit] aus einem jeden seine tiefste Gefahr heraus, die vergangen schien, und stellt sie weider vor ihn hin, ganz nah, in die nächste Stunde. . . . Und mit dem, was kommt, hebt sich ein ganzes Gewirr irrer Erinnerungen, das daranhängt wie nasser Tang an einer versunkenen Sache.¹⁶

If the past still lives in the unconscious and is available, however fragmented, to memory, it can be understood as contemporaneous with the present and not, therefore, lost and in back of him. Malte senses that, potentially at least, the divisions and boundaries of time might not be so absolute or inevitable that no recourse to their rigidity is possible.

With his first step into history, Malte drew on the past that lay within him in the form of his personal memory and began to bring it again into immediacy. As I indicated earlier, Malte as artist was attracted originally to the idea of time as linear sequence because of the relation of that kind of time to narrative form. He discovers, of course, that sequential time can be experienced only at the most frightful cost. But implicit in the recovery of the past in present time is the possibility of a new mode of experiencing based on a sense that all time is simultaneous, a mode that asserts a unity transcending (because it ignores) all boundaries. Part of the shape of the Aufzeichnungen is based on this attempt and on the premises implied within it. If this attempt to establish simultaneity (Zugleich-Sein) fails—and it is not clear whether Malte saw all the contours of possibility—it does so for several reasons. First, in order to shape or to show a unity, Malte had eventually to Malte sense out of his childhood or, as he says, to finish it. That would mean finally to understand his childhood in relation to his present self; to create, in other words, the full narrative sequence between Ulsgaard and Paris. He could not get even that far: "Ich habe um meine Kindheit gebeten, und sie ist wiedergekommen, und ich fühle, dass sie immer noch so schwer ist wie damals und dass es nichts genützt hat, älter zu werden."¹⁷ Clearly, Malte is unable to cohere his present experience of time into linear form, the form he concluded was death time. It would follow, then, that the more difficult mode of simultaneity was surely impossible for him, no matter to what degree he might have sensed what it could do. But even beyond this, given Malte's limitations, the simultaneity he saw as a possibility, both with his own memory and that of Europe's history, was fatally limited because it had no sense of the future but only of the present as the place where the past ends. To Malte radiant and harmonic wholeness out of a full sense of all dimensions in time was beyond what Malte could do: he could not bring into his potential unity what would have to come from the breaking of that ultimate boundary which is in no sense ordinarily available, the division between present and future. Ironically, Malte had known even as a child that the boundaries of any moment in time and space were not inviolable and that they could be shattered, sporadically for most people but regularly for some. Old Count Brahe would not permit chronological sequence, the distinctions between past, present, and future, to have any meaning for him: "Personen, die er einmal in seine Erinnerung aufgenommen hatte, existierten, und daran konnte ihr Absterben nicht das geringste ändern."¹⁸ He had even been known to speak to a frightened girl, just pregnant for the first time, of the travels of one of her sons. For him, obviously, the pyramid of consciousness was an immediate and present fact in which he permanently lived. Indeed, the boundaries of reality had broken for Malte himself at several points, e.g., when a hand breached the wall under the table and reached out of another world groping to clasp his own hand. Shattered boundaries are everywhere in the Aufzeichnungen: ghosts walk out of the past into a dining room, houses that are no longer there rise suddenly, restlessly, into present consciousness and fade slowly again. Malte's attraction to the mode of simultaneous time arose naturally out of what he had been and where he had come from. The problems, the impossibilities, come from what and where he is now.

Yet at the end a solution seems to offer itself; not, it should be added, that Malte necessarily made use of the solution he had come to see. Individual seeing-points in his own and Europe's history—the girl at the party in Venice, Gaspara Stampa, the Portuguese nun—all cluster eventually into a pattern which unfolds at the end into the story of the Prodigal Son, "die Legende dessen . . .der nicht geliebt werden wollte."¹⁹ With the idea of intransitive love Malte comes to see what for others had been a mode of organizing self which transcends all pain and loss; which, in fact, needs loss in order to accomplish itself fully. Intransitive love begins, as consolation began for the old mad king Charles, when all happiness is long and forever past. If such love shuns, even fears, reciprocity, that comes only because the receiving of love from any other lover than the Highest would negate the whole point of intransitive love, the meaning of its movement, which is the most complete fulfillment of self in the most exacting kind of loving. Any being other than the Ultimate Being would be lesser, and the love would therefore not be all that it could have been. From the human point of view, that is, from the lover's, God is so far away that the process of loving towards him becomes itself the center of contemplation:

Manchmal früher fragte ich mich, warum Abelone die Kalorien ihres grossartigen Gefühls nicht an Gott wandte. Ich weiss, sie sehnte sich, ihrer Liebe alles Transitive zu nehmen, aber konnte ihr wahrhaftiges Herz sich darüber täuschen, dass Gott nur eine Richtung der Liebe ist, kein Liebesgegenstand? Wusste sie nicht, dass keine Gegenliebe von ihm zu fürchten war?²⁰

Such love, then, can be accomplished only by an incessant drive forward, all passion channeled into this one obsessive loving which carries the whole being on with it toward a goal so distant that it can be understood only as a process, not as an ending. To stop is to perish: "Geliebtwerden ist vergehen, Lieben ist dauern."²¹

With this sense that God "nur eine Richtung der Liebe ist, kein Liebesgegenstand," there rises to the surface perhaps the most profound aspect of the idea of intransitive love. For that love is linear, inexorably and necessarily so. It is, in fact, so engrossed with implacable forward movement in time that it feels itself cheated when Christ comes to meet it, for the lovers had expected only the endless road, and they are somehow wronged. Their love, in other words, can be accomplished only in linear time, and they need all the linear time they can possibly get in order to fulfill what for them becomes the encompassing task of their being. Malte came to realize that for these women lovers (the Prodigal Son shows that men can be involved when the lover is God) the experience of intransitive love could be seen as their way of coming to terms with the problems of sequential time. If sequential temporal movement can be neither negated nor ignored, it can become the necessary framework within which a special kind of love unfolds and develops as it works its way toward God. Linear time might be death time, but for these lovers it is the most fruitful temporal mode, the only one which can give their love the shape it needs.

If Malte, here and now in the great hospital that is Paris, saw all this and saw it clearly, then he would have found what could have been a way out for himself. Whether he took that way seems doubtful indeed, for to see is not to do, and learning to see was all that Malte's strength would allow him. The book ends, though, with the fulfillment of the activity with which it began. If Malte never achieved the fullness of vision which brings life and death into a comprehensible harmony, he at least learned to see how the move toward death could also involve the fulfilling of love. The Aufzeichnungen end with everything yet to be done but with a way of doing now, at last, in sight.

¹ From the letter of 11 August 1924 in Rainer Maria Rilke, Gesammelte Briefe in Sechs Bänden, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig, 1939-41), v, 292. The edition is hereafter cited as Briefe. The passage translates as follows: simple Being can become an event for us, that inviolable immediacy and simultaneity of everything which, at the upper "normal" point of self-consciousness, we are allowed to experience only as "termination."

²Ibid.; "which would be capable of comprehending the past and the not-yet-occurred simply as presence to the ultimate degree."

³ From the letter of 11 April 1910 to Manon zu Salms-Laubach in Briefe, III, 99. This letter might well be the cause of the comparative scarcity of literary studies of the Aufzeichnungen, most commentaries confining themselves primarily, to a study of the book as a stage in Rilke's spiritual development. There are useful comments on the form of the Aufzeichnungen in Armand Nivelle, "Sens et structure des Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge" Revue d'esthétique, XII (1959), iii-iv, 5-32, and in Ulrich Fülleborn, "Form und Sinn der 'Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge'. Rilkes Prosabuch und der moderne Roman," Unterscheidung und Bewahrung. Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch, ed. Klaus Lazarowicz and Wolfgang Kron (Berlin, 1961), pp. 147-169. There are suggestive remarks on the aufzeichnungen scattered throughout Maurice Betz, Rilke in Paris (Zürich, 1948), some of the remarks being retrospective comments by Rilke. See also Rainer Maria Rilke. Inge Junghanns. Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Herwig (Leipzig, 1959), pp. 41-70, and Ernst Hoffmann, "Zum dichterischen Verfahren in Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge," in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, XLII (1967), 202-230.

⁴ All quotations from the novel follow the text in the Insel-Verlag edition of the Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1955-66), VI (1966). This quotation is from p. 711. Translation: Have I already said it? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. But I intend to Malte good use of my time.

⁵ P. 750; "The stubborn life of these rooms had not allowed itself to be trampled out. It was still there. It held onto the nails which had been left, it stood on the remaining handsbreath of flooring, it huddled under the places where the corners began, where there was still a little bit of space within."

⁶ P. 709; "The main thing was, being alive. That was the main thing."

⁷ P. 712; "naked wounded head without a face."

⁸ P. 855; "But now the master of the hunt was dead, and not he alone. Now the heart had been pierced through, our heart, the heart of our race. Now it was finished. This was, then, the breaking of the helmet: Today Brigge and nevermore,' something said within me."

⁹Ibid.; "It was an individual heart. It was already at the point of beginning from the beginning."

¹⁰ P. 870; "And then he had devised that business with the poems. One would scarcely have believed how that helped. When one recited a poem thus, slowly and with even accentuation of the end-rhymes, then to a certain extent something stable was there on which one could gaze, inwardly of course."

¹¹Ibid.; "I remember this story so accurately because it reassured me greatly. I may well say that I have never had so agreeable a neighbor as this Nikolaj Kusmitsch, who certainly would also have admired me."

¹² Pp. 882-883; "The people, who wanted him, without having anyone special in mind, made him only freer and more unbounded in his possibilities."

¹³ P. 882; "I am not disinclined to believe that the strength of his transformation lay in his no longer being anyone's son. (That is finally the strength of all young people who have gone away.)"

¹⁴ P. 910; "understood that true consolation began only when happiness was far enough gone and forever past."

¹⁵ P. 850; "At that time, of course, I could not tell whether he was brilliant, or this and that to which people attach value—: but he was."

¹⁶ P. 766; "With a somnambulistic certainty [this illness] hauls out of each person his deepest danger, which seemed passed, and places it again before him, quite near and imminent. .. . And with that which comes there arises a whole confusion of mad memories which hang on it like wet seaweed on some sunken thing."

¹⁷ P. 767; "I have prayed for my childhood and it has come back, and I feel that it is still as difficult as it was then and that getting older has been no help."

¹⁸ P. 735; "People whom he had once taken into his memory continued to exist, and their death could not change that in the slightest."

¹⁹ P. 938; "the story of him . . . who did not want to be loved."

²⁰ P. 937; "I had sometimes wondered earlier why Abelone did not turn the calories of her magnificent feeling toward God. I know that she longed to remove everything transitive from her love, but could her truthful heart be deceived about God's being only a direction of love, not an object of love? Did she not know that she need fear no return of love from Him?"

²¹Ibid.; "To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure."