things...Rilke
Rilke .. "saw in things magnetic poles around which "all movement subsides and becomes contour, and out of past and future time something permanent is formed."..
To fully appreciate Rilke’s argument, we need to return to his great work of poetry, which spanned his experience of the First World War. Rilke was looking for a way to connect things to transcendence without denying their very thingness. If "we are not really at home in our interpreted world," he wrote in the Duino Elegies, he held out the hope that a tree, or a street, or a habit, could slip past the border guards of our self-consciousness and establish that missing unmediated connection. He urged close looking as a way to that goal, to gaze at, say, a puppet "so intensely that at last, to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and make the stuffed skins startle into life."...
Rilke’s quest for healing during the horror of war led him to connect the evidence of the material past-the realm of the antiquaries-with the mental realities we make of them. These "extravagances of the heart" become part of us...
Rilke wanted to awaken our astonishment at seeing things and practices as exquisite bearers of identity, not simply as tools or products; not as "outputs" but as essences." (Peter N. Miller, Chronicle, August 11, 2014).
To fully appreciate Rilke’s argument, we need to return to his great work of poetry, which spanned his experience of the First World War. Rilke was looking for a way to connect things to transcendence without denying their very thingness. If "we are not really at home in our interpreted world," he wrote in the Duino Elegies, he held out the hope that a tree, or a street, or a habit, could slip past the border guards of our self-consciousness and establish that missing unmediated connection. He urged close looking as a way to that goal, to gaze at, say, a puppet "so intensely that at last, to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and make the stuffed skins startle into life."...
Rilke’s quest for healing during the horror of war led him to connect the evidence of the material past-the realm of the antiquaries-with the mental realities we make of them. These "extravagances of the heart" become part of us...
Rilke wanted to awaken our astonishment at seeing things and practices as exquisite bearers of identity, not simply as tools or products; not as "outputs" but as essences." (Peter N. Miller, Chronicle, August 11, 2014).