Let Your Being Be

Duino Elegies 

and The Sonnets to Orpheus 

by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

My introduction to Rilke was through his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where he introduces many of the themes that permeate the Elegies and Sonnets. Here we find references to alienation, fear, poverty, loneliness, art, disease, and death. Yet even with death there is great beauty and soaring poetry even in translation (especially fine by Stephen Mitchell).

Rilke creates powerful yet elegant poetic odes to the majesty of the human experience and its relationship to the external world in this comprehensive translation of two major works. A realm in which the human being exists in a state of perplexity and struggle. I was fascinated by the ideas of death as an other, the "terrible rival" from the notebooks, and a meditation on the fear of death as well as death overcome. The great joy of learning to be yourself and enjoy your being; what I call a will to relax and "let your being be". The many aspects of love that appear both as desire and as a rival for the work of the artist.

Through it all we find the poet "learning to see" with a new will and a new being. There were moments I was reminded of Nietzsche's Zarathrustra, and of course Orpheus and and other myths from Ovid along with the Bible and other literary resonances. Above all I came to accept Rilke's admonishment for us to go ahead and become "beginners". To begin is to begin to create and will your being and ultimately your life, even in the face of death.

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is sponsored  by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl

This week's topic is all about literary dynamic duos. I have listed ten of my favorites from among the many literary duos I've encountered in my many years of reading.

 1. The Iliad by Homer: Achilles and Patroclus are perhaps the greatest of friends in this magnificent epic. Unfortunately neither of them survived the Trojan War, but their cohort Odysseus was able to carry on in The Odyssey.

2. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson:  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are perhaps the closest duo in this list since they are two sides of the same human. They are also the eeriest of duos on my list.

3. The Epic of Gilgamesh:  This earliest of duos established the mold, for Enkidu and Gilgamesh were a legendary dynamic duo in ancient Mesopotamian mythology: Enkidu as the wartime comrade and friend of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk.

4. Don Quixote by Cervantes: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza made one of the most delightful and interesting duos I've ever encountered in all my reading.

5. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais: This duo was made famous in Rabelais' ribald and utterly undefinable satire that made fun of everyone and everything.

6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, his buddy, are the epitome of the American dynamic duo and a favorite from my youthful reading.

7. The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett: Nick and Nora Charles are my favorite dynamic detective duo who solved crimes on a lark (with drink in hand). 

8. Dracula by Bram Stoker:  Jonathan Harker and Dr. Van Helsing make a macabre but thoroughly dynamic duo that could not exist without each other.

9. Alices's Adventures Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are two rotund little men who are identical except that they are left-right reversals of each other. Just two of the amazing and often dynamic characters that Alice encounters in this book and her Adventures in Wonderland.

10. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock and Watson are the last on my list but certainly among the most dynamic of duos. 

Whitman's Civil War Memoranda

Memoranda during the War 

by Walt Whitman

"I was in the habit of reading to the men. They were very fond of it, and liked declamatory poetical pieces."   ― Walt Whitman, p 55.

Walt Whitman's Memoranda During the War is the best book I have read about a seldom thought about aspect of the Civil War. Having gone to Washington D. C. at the end of 1862 to visit his wounded brother George, Walt stayed there to tend to the sick and wounded through the end of the War. He writes about the known and the unknown, the anonymous soldiers who all too frequently did not survive their wounds.
"Common People . . . to me the main interest of the War, I found, (and still, on recollection find,) in those specimens, and in the ambulance, the Hospital, and even the dead on the field.)" (p 6)

The narrative displays the sort of interior history that you cannot get in history books. There is present in his prose a sort of ethereal innocence at times and an immediacy that comes from the contemporaneous notes that Whitman maintained in small notebooks. Throughout the narrative is imbued with thoughts of Homer's Iliad that Whitman held close to his heart. But even closer to his heart were the beautiful young boys who were being sacrificed on the battlefields. The contradictions of those he saw who would often be dead before the week was over contrasted with the bodies that lay on the battlefields, sometimes for a week or more before they were retrieved.

He found time to insert his observations from his walks around Washington. One poetic moment he described The White House at night; "the brilliant gas-light shining---the palace-like portico---the tall, round columns, spotless as snow . . ." What a contrast with his days in the hospitals surrounded by blood-soaked wounded soldiers, too young to be called the veterans that they were.

He concludes the narrative with his speculations about the future for the country. This provides a fitting ending for what is a fascinating, moving, and above all a heartfelt account of our greatest poet's experiences during the Civil War.

Native Americans in Oakland

There There 

by Tommy Orange

“Life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you, into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically. Keep your head down and make it work.”   ― Tommy Orange, There There





"There is no there there," said Gertrude Stein of Oakland, California, and in the title of Tommy Orange's debut novel. This is an excellent depiction of Oakland in the twenty-first century, as well as the indigenous people that live there. The city has come to symbolize Native Americans' loss of homeland and identity throughout American history.

"We know the sound of the freeway better than rivers, the roar of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the scent of gas and freshly wet pavement and burned rubber better than the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread," according to the novel's prologue.

The story follows 12 Native American people who all live in Oakland, or have lived there in the past, and who all come together for a major powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. This polyphonic novel, on the other hand, is significantly more intricate and sophisticated than that short description suggests. Each character has a unique relationship with his or her Native culture.

Orange emphasizes the importance of cultural inheritance and how it contributes to the generational divide among Native Americans. Because of the ways their culture has damaged them in the past, the older characters have moved past caring about connecting with it. One of the novel's initial narrators, Opal Victoria Bear Shield, recalls a childhood spent on Alcatraz, where her mother and several other Native American families stayed during the 1969-1971 occupation. She is unable to fathom her mother's decision to relocate her and her sister to a location with diminishing food, sparse accommodations, and complete isolation as a youngster, only later realizing that it was motivated by her mother's desire to fight for her culture.

Thus certain aspects of the modern Native American experience - often the more dark ones - are told through the experiences of these twelve characters. It is a well-written exploration of the urban life of some members of the indigenous population with particular storylines that are more compelling than others. The book is helped by both its structure and the thoughtfulness of the author in planning the arc of the story.

Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

The New World of Philosophy 

by Abraham Kaplan

"To describe a man's philosophy is to say how he orients himself to the world of his experience, what meanings he finds in events, what values he aspires to, what standards guide his choices in all he does." (p 4, Abraham Kaplan)




A collection of interpretive examinations of some of the major intellectual movements of the modern era. Mr. Kaplan's nine lectures cover a wide range of topics, from pragmatism and analytic philosophy, which are regarded technical theories, to existentialism, communism, and psychoanalysis, and are written with a wit and pungency rarely seen in philosophic discourse. Lectures on Buddhism, Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Zen explore the philosophy and religion of the East.

In these essays he highlights common themes including rationality, activism, humanism, and values in general. Starting from a point of view that was characterized millennia ago by Aristotle as Man's "desire to know", Kaplan attempts to show how new philosophies have absorbed or reacted to the ideas promulgated by philosopher's over the centuries. In doing so he raises the question of how we should view this "brave new world" of philosophy and answers it in ways that hopefully emphasize a positive approach to these new ideas.