While his subject matter is, in many ways, limited, the way in which he writes about it is universal, transcending both time and place. The thing about Rilke that I discovered when I picked up that first book of his, all those years ago, is that he said so many of the things I was thinking at seventeen, and at twenty-seven, and even now, a hundred years before those thoughts crossed my mind.
But the words, while so specific, are somehow also timeless and applicable to vast expanses of our collective experience. In the Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, he writes about almost nothing else.
Poems on the most improbable subject, one in which I’d never had any interest and in which, outside of them, I still don’t: angels. That book, the title of which I can no longer recall, was the beginning of a lifetime spent reading and rereading the same poems. Sometimes, they are a tired, dog-eared paperback, long neglected in a high school library. We never know what they are, we are never looking for them. There are so many funny things about life, but one of my favourites among them is that the things that are meant to find us always do. I remembered reading something by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke around Remembrance Day one year, so picking up one of this books seemed like a natural choice. And while I appreciated the sentiment, I wanted to understand the era about which it was written in a context outside of combat. The rebrand has just begun, but if you want to know a little bit more about why I’ve decided to move on, and where we’re going after thirteen years of Coco & Vera, take a peek at the About page.)īefore my first experience of Rilke, I’d read Generals Die in Bed. (Welcome to Coco & Voltaire, a fashion blog about life and travel viewed through a literary lens. I spent my spare time, which was plentiful, in the library, spinning the creaky metal racks of paperbacks until I found a book that caught my eye. My attendance at school was perfunctory, a social exercise, at best, rather than an educational one. I had no more than three classes each semester, which I went to simply for lack of anything else to do. As years go, twelfth grade was a waste of time for me.
Earlier that year, I’d decided I should focus on reading classics. I can’t pretend to remember which one it was – I don’t have a clue. I was seventeen when I picked up one of Rilke’s books for the first time. Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitobaīook: Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
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