Rilke's Letters on Cézanne

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, aptly translated by Joel Agee, is a treatise on seeing that manages to remain startling. Rilke lived in the late 1800 and early 1900s and the letters, devoted largely to responses to Rilke's viewings of Cézanne's work at the Salon D'Automne in Paris in 1907, comprise a strange meandering essay that reflects Rilke's own unique brand of spirtual aesthetics refracted through a prism of meditations on Paris and the painting process.

Rilke's writing style is both old-fashioned and timeless. Above all there is a sense of intellectual acuity and innate innocence combined with a sense of adventurousness that it would be all but impossible to recapture in our overexposed, oversaturated, cynical times. Although at times the theme linking the letters together seems a tad too strained to engender a unified book, the letters create a fascinating window into another mind in another time that is worth cohabiting.

Some excerpts:

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger,of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

". . . all the summer flowers, the dahlia and the tall gladiolas and the long rows of geraniums shot the contradiction of their red into the mist."

"Perhaps one has to have a clearer insight into the nature of one's 'task,' get a more tangible hold on it, recognize it in a hundred details."

"If only one had nothing but work memories from the beginning: how firm the ground would be under one's feet, one would stand. But this way, there isn't a moment when one isn't sinking in somewhere. That it's this way inside, too: double world -- that's the worst thing of all."

". . . with this disposition, which was completely developed now, thanks to his strangeness and insularity, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever. Can you imagine what that is like, and what it' like to experience this through him?"

"Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted."

"To achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object, this seemed to himto be the purpose of his innermost work. . . "

". . . it was Balzac who had foreseen or forefelt that in painting you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no one can deal with it."

"Landscapes, very light pencil outlines and, here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there's an accidental scattering of color, a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch: as if mirroring a melody --."

"The night cafe [by Van Gogh] I already wrote about; but a lot more could be said about its artificial wakefulness in wine red, lamp yellow, deep and utterly shallow green, with three mirrors, each of which contains a different emptiness. "

"Just as in the mouth of a dog various secretions will gather in anticipation at the approach of various things -- consenting ones for drawing out nutrients, and correcting ones to neutralize poisions: in the same way, various intensifications and dilutions take place in the core of every color, helping it to survive contact with others."

Post Mortem: I bought the hardcover volume for $2.00 at an annual local library booksale. The library does not retain a copy of the book. It was lightly marked with some pencil and probably hadn't been checked out in years. It is an excellent library, which I use all the time. Still, I wonder about the lack of a replacement copy and the decision to exile it in the first place.