Practically a manifesto, and I underlined so much that it has become quite difficult to put down exactly what I feel about it. But I suppose trying to try, simply because it feels neccessary to do so, I suppose that’s the whole point, right? I mean it’s all just somehow stuff we alwaysknew, deep down, somewhere in there. Rilke is somehow able to tempt that stuff out; and it’s just brilliantly put—with real venom and ice. With all the clarity of a crisp winter morning. And with a natural clarity: there is nothing digital about it. Rilke appears to have no artifice.
The modernist masterpiece and without having read it, and despite all internal mental protest to the contrary, it turns out I’d never really understood what that term meant anyway. Somewhere between the anxiety of losing the past and an impulse to build the new. Impulse in the face of anxiety: that is modernism.
This book will leave you on the face of a cliff: facing an wide anonymous northern ocean and exposed to the headwind. Everything in you is blown about—there is cold bright sunshine; a passing shower—and the oil is stripped from your face. Where the past meant conformity—meant meeting standards and petitfours in warm cloisters—and where the new meant this cliff: this raw,and sometimes unintelligible experience of new. Not a stream but a river. And it’s terrifying in large parts. The characters—all so full of recognition that their lives simply come at them. That it does not appear to be in their power to control these things. Even for Bernard: who is clearly Woolfs’ write-in. And then setting all this upstream chaos against the never ending beating-on of time…
I’d love to write it gifted too, but I’m glad not to be her.
