Then there was his marriage, which had begun in 1901. The two or three years afterward were the closest Rilke ever came to the normal experience of domesticity. Yet both he and Clara must have realized early on that it wouldn’t work as a real marriage, and each of them must have been trying to work out a livable, amicable compromise. I have known people who were bitterly hostile to Rilke for, as they put it, abandoning his wife and child. But he was dealing with an existential problem opposite from the one that most of us need to resolve: whereas we find a thick, if translucent, barrier between self and other, he was often without even the thinnest differentiating membrane. And unlike more grounded people who have passed through the initial terror and experienced this openness as freedom, Rilke often found himself being swallowed up by a lover or a neighbor or a man with Saint Vitus’ dance walking down a Paris boulevard. You can see it in his eyes: the powerful intuition of the state of being that is called God, the huge, oppressive longing for it, and the desolation. (I once showed a psychic friend of mine a late photo of Rilke, and it took her three hours to recover from the glance.) So, as a matter of self-preservation, he required an enormous amount of space around himself; how much, he only began to understand after he was married. He both loved and feared solitude, he often wanted to escape from it, but it was the necessary condition for his poetry. The monk and the lover inside him, each a powerful and conflicting presence, were never able to merge. But throughout his correspondence, and especially in these letters of 1903-1904, he was constantly thinking about sexual love and the relationship between a man and a woman; and he did see what had to evolve, even if he himself couldn’t achieve it. We need only consider some of the other great poets of our century — Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, Valéry — to realize how unusually filled with the idea of relationship Rilke’s solitude was.
