‘I sense that to work is to live without dying…’

This book details the poet Rilke's life in Paris, with splashes of his travels outside of France.

I've only read his "Letters to a Young Poet", which is a gracious and posthumous collection of letters. This book contains not only journals and letters by Rilke, but observations of Paris, much of what would envelop and become Rilke's "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge".

Overall, this is a tidy, and quite short book, but it does contain many perceptions of Paris that are deeply interesting, especially those about death.

The overriding atmosphere in all Rilke’s communication is one of the overt presence of death, exemplified by the hospitals that he sees on his perambulations. ‘I see now why they figure so often in Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, you suddenly feel that in this city there are legions of the sick, armies of the dying, whole populations of the dead.’

I liked reading about Stefan Zweig having seen Rilke on a bus:

Zweig also recounts an earlier sighting of Rilke, when he chanced upon the poet riding the top deck of an omnibus, as if in a trance, curiously out of place amongst the other passengers. The sight of Rilke awkwardly embedded in this modern vehicle, silently passing in anonymity and unaware of his friend’s presence, had clearly touched Zweig.

And oh, the suffering paragraphs:

I know of no incantation; it is God who must pronounce it when the times are completed. I can only wait patiently. I can only bear with faith that deep source that lives on these long days sealed within me, heavy as a stone. But life is there, and it wants to use me for everything, my stone and me. So then, I am lost and I suffer…

In summary, this book was interesting but brief; I'd like to have read a bit more about the context, which to me seems faint, apart from the actual descriptions of where Rilke physically roamed Paris. The good bits were Rilke's quotes interspersed with faint information.