Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Keep going. No feeling is final.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
René Karl Wihelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a poet and novelist born in 1875’s Prague, when Prague was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At his birth, his mother still grieved the death of her first child, a daughter. It was reported that this grief led her to treat René delicately and to dress him finely. In short, she wanted a daughter and used her son to assuage that yearning. According to prevailing accounts, this informed his way of being throughout his childhood and into his early adolescent years, developing into a love for the arts. Consequently, before reaching full adolescence, his parents pressed him to enter military school, an unmistakably clear effort to temper his artistic bent. Poetically, he withdrew from military school due to illness, and thereafter spent a number of years exploring other options for formal education, including studying some time in what would now be described as “trade school”. He eventually took up university studies in literature, philosophy, and art history. René met Lou Andreas-Salomé, while René was in his mid-twenties, and they began a love affair that betrayed her marriage. Lou, a trained psychoanalyst, encouraged René to change his name to the more masculine Rainer, and René yielded to her influence. Together, and sometimes including Lou’s husband Friedrich, they travelled throughout Russia. During those years of traveling and searching, René –now Rainer– met Tolstoy and other deeply pensive, later well-known Russian artists. And, through those years of probing, Rainer, a non-practicing Catholic and increasing skeptic, undertook a largely objective exploration of faith and belief. Rainer’s thorough examination of God, the meaning of prayer, and his questions around why we suffer, carried on through his travels to Paris, and later materialized, in part, in his poetry. It was during this time that he wrote and published the expositive Go to the Limits of Your Longing, in which he surveys his thoughts on God and humanity, but more importantly the juxtaposition of beauty with suffering. From this well-spring of thoughts and doubts emerged, “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Keep going. No feeling is final.” Rainer died in apparent turmoil at 51.
What do we do in the now, this the interim between yesterday’s time-gone-by and the future’s promise of what’s to come?
Life comes at us fast! Even when we carefully mark time, or if we fastidiously observe minute details, today is plannedas twenty-four hours, but lived as eight. A fun weekend lunch with friends was at once two hours long and just fifteen minutes. A work meeting that seemed insufferably protracted ends, and what was a two-hour meeting has somehow reduced the work day to just a few remaining hours. Yesterday we were eighteen years old and today we are forty-five because time, while relative, is generally fleeting. This means that when happy occurrences surprise us, but also, and especially, devastating ones, as suddenly as they arrived, they will be gone, even when it feels like time is standing still.
What do we do in the now, this the interim between yesterday’s time-gone-by and the future’s promise of what’s to come?
In February of 2020, just before COVID became a daily force in my life, I received what would become my final haircut, for nine months! I am the second of four sons, and was taught to share. Consequently, when I made my “final” grocery run, I bought an abundance for myself but never everything on the shelves. I wanted others to have, assuming that they would also undertake a hard quarantine for what was then projected as a now laughable and saddening two months. During those first nine months, I gestated a 70s-style afro and fed an unhealthy obsession with death, illness, and survival. I adopted a lemon tree, spent good money to have a ginger plant delivered from Homestead, Florida, and thoroughly evaluated both my personal savings and the capital I had raised in my small consultancy. By my calculations, I had funds sufficient to live comfortably for at least six months, possibly a year if I lived frugally.
But then, on a rare pandemic drive to the beach for fresh air –once the beaches were re-opened– my truck began to stall and putter. I disregarded this first indication of trouble, assuming that my truck just needed “exercise” after having sat unused for two months. I extended the drive in an effort to stretch my truck’s legs and re-condition its troubled engine, to no avail. My sense of auto mechanics was typically ill-informed. My heart fluttered at this challenge to my well-planned budget. The next morning, dressed completely covered, including a long-sleeved shirt and full pants during a typically balmy Florida summer, I set an appointment with a mechanic, put a surgical mask in my pocket, and delivered my once reliable vehicle to exhaust experts. I entered the facility masked, anxious, observant, concerned, and generally on edge. Would someone cough or sneeze, unmasked? Would they be standing too closely and spray me with coronavirus? Would I become infected with coronavirus while handing my keys off? Would the repairs be costly? Would repairs be possible on a fourteen-year-old truck that had been driven over two hundred thousand miles? I could feel my heart frantically expand against and then recede away from the breast plate enclosing it. I began to feel concerningly light-headed. Something inside said, “Breathe.” So I did. What felt like a thirty-minute wait was barely five; I consulted my phone to confirm the time. My truck was reparable, although it would cost nearly a month’s budget to repair. I stood outside to wait for a Lyft and to worry, and hoped that the driver would arrive masked and reasonably cautious. He was neither, and seemed peeved that I requested he please wear a mask during our ride together. This was July of 2020 in Florida, and we were supposed to be post-pandemic. He and much of Florida werepost-pandemic. Most of the rest of the world and I were not. My truck was repaired twice more for exhaust issues before it was whole again, and I was now down a month and half’s budget.
Having survived this scare, I soothed myself with good food, made from relatively fresh groceries. I had begun in May, once my supplies from March waned thin, to order groceries to my home. I was grateful that “first responders” were willing to work in the public during those confusing times and tipped the deliverers generously. This meant that I often received everything I ordered, even during supply shortages, and it arrived as if I myself had retrieved those groceries from the market. I used the dried beans and chicken stock to make a hearty bean soup, dressed with fresh herbs (thyme and Italian parsley) and fresh dried spices (cumin, celery seeds, a pinch of crushed red peppers, and sweet onion granules), and then mixed in chicken I roasted separately in safflower oil with garlic and leeks. It was lush! I was soothed. I later took fully brown bananas I had purchased days earlier through the Fresh Market pick-up service, when the Costa Rican imports were young and firm, and roasted them in the oven, skin-on but punctured, for fifteen minutes at 350 degrees. This drew out their oils and sugars, intensified their flavor. I folded these intense banana flavors into the other ingredients for banana bread and baked two loaves. I wrapped and froze one for “emergencies” and knifed two generous slices from the other. I sat on a well-dressed balcony and looked out at my truck and the stars. Crisis averted.
Two weeks later I awakened to the throbbing pain of a tooth ache. I had spent the evening watching Chef James Martin make interesting British food, as I snacked on multiple fistfuls of almonds. “It was the almonds,” I concluded. The grinding had irritated a nerve under a tooth, and that tooth just needed a few almond-free days. My knowledge of dentistry was even more challenged than my comprehension of auto mechanics. And, as with my truck, I instantly knew that I would soon have to find a tooth mechanic. I tried staving off breaking quarantine yet again by spending the day with my mouth closed. Why die of coronavirus getting a tooth repaired? After all, it was the air, or perhaps all that breathing I was doing, that caused my tooth to ache. I did open my mouth to eat and drink warm water. I endured the pain for two days more before I could no longer sleep at night. In fact, at one point the pain was so thorough and unsettling that I could only lie down for an hour before having to get out of bed. (Mysteriously, standing hurt less than lying down.) For a full night, I slept lying down for an hour and then standing for thirty minutes, on and off until my foolishness gave way to good sense. The next morning, my body was so tired and my mind weary. I could not have borne another relatively sleepless night. I phoned an emergency dentist, and she saw me the very next day. Four hours post procedure, I was relieved pain-wise but less nearly two months’ budget, the price of comfort and sleep, rest for my fatigued brain, and of being able to eat almonds again.
The budget that was supposed to have lasted twelve months, would now only carry me another five to six, as long as there was not another crisis. Naturally, the tooth I had repaired at a rather high cost became infected. The second dentist who undertook the repairs suggested that it might have been wise for the first dentist to have prescribed a course of antibiotics. A ha. The repairs of the initial repairs, were even more expensive! With this third emergency, I was now in budgetary crisis. And, while I knew I could survive at least three more months while I attempted to regain momentum for my consultancy, I simply had no fight left.
I began to feel, in my body and mind, that I lived alone, that I ate alone, that I laid a troubled head down on soft pillows alone, that I awakened to the next day’s worries alone, that I absorbed the impact of the social unrest alone, that I worried for the lives of young Black protesters and other protesters alone, and that I was attempting to rebuild my life during a pandemic, alone. Although I had both friends and support, as a wise friend once said, one can be in a room filled with people and still feel very alone. I accepted an invitation from my parents to move home and be closer to family. They even gave me a house that had been willed to them by a family friend (a friend who was more like an aunt to us “kids” and a confidant to my parents). I moved into that home and took on its full story. Its beginnings deep in the woods of South Alabama in the 1970s. Its age-related structural issues. Its feeling of abandonment. A fully furnished home –personal clothing and effects included—sat waiting for its owners to return. The sense that here, in this now my home, time had stopped. And, then the metaphor emerged.
Nothing behind me will change. Nothing ahead of me will be certain.
My new home represents the challenges of moving forward in life through its difficulties. Old unstable floors will have to be shored up, some walls will have to be replaced and others re-painted, old clothing folded and removed, pictures carefully taken down and stored. Nothing behind me will change. Nothing ahead of me will be certain. And, as I re-build here deep in the woods, and build a new life through the pandemic, I will let everything I cannot control happen, the foreseeable and the unexpected, the beauty and the terror, assured by the absolute certainty that no feeling is final.
