A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father's death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of.

On moonlit nights his mother would turn out the lights and stand naked in front of the mirror! Then he would lie awake for hours, fretted by visions of emptiness. An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

9

In the camp they are a member, like a finger, of an endless body. Moving out would be an amputation. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.

John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Gregor MacGregor

User Prufrock451 answering the question “In light of the recent Mars One news, were there any "scams" targeting people who wanted to travel to the New World?” on r/AskHistorians on Reddit

One of the greatest scams of all time was perpretrated by Gregor MacGregor. MacGregor was born in Scotland to a well-off family. He served in the British Army, and then signed on with Bolivar's liberation movement. He fought in the Caribbean, and briefly occupied a town in East Florida.

At the end of a decade of adventuring, MacGregor had a reputation but not much money. He returned to London in 1820 and announced he'd been made a chief by the Miskito Indians, who'd granted him 76,000 square miles of land. MacGregor named this make-believe country Poyais and sold land rights to a couple thousand British settlers.

Unbelievably, his scam didn't fall apart until luckless settlers took him at his word and sailed to Honduras in 1822 - to find an abandoned, lawless shore. A storm wrecked one of their ships. The settlers tried to make a go of it, but failed - when they were evacuated in 1823, 180 of the 240 settlers were dead. MacGregor hustled for Paris- some of his victims so suckered they still insisted the colony would have succeeded if MacGregor had gone with them.

In France, MacGregor was put on trial for fraud but was acquited in 1826 - his lawyer was able to pin blame on MacGregor's associates and employees. MacGregor kept up the Poyais scam for another decade, finding fewer and fewer buyers, and in 1839 he moved to Venezuela, gaining citizenship on the strength of his record under Bolivar. He died there in 1845 on a general's pension.

A good account is David Sinclair's "The Land that Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History."

Joe Steel: great in dictatoring, not so much in conjugation

Some historians chatting about maligned historic names in r/AskHistorians on Reddit

How common was the surname 'Hitler' in Germany/Austria prior to the 1930s? Did people later drop it because of its connotations?

question_all_the_thi According to William Shirer, it was a twist of fate that made Hitler what he became when his father got his name changed from Schikelgruber to Hitler.

Can you imagine a crowd shouting "Heil Schickelgruber"?

Epistaxis He'd probably just have made up some snappy mythological name for himself then. Josef Stalin ("Joe Steel") was born Ioseb Jughashvili.

beaverteeth92 On a side note, he was also Georgian. A lot of people don't know that. Like Russian wasn't his first language.

cananada88 I seem to vaguely recall a college paper I wrote years ago talking about how poor his Russian conjugation was. It was to the extent that no one would correct him out of fear and some of his misspeaking floated into the language at large.

This was years ago, so I am sure someone around here can correct or refine me.

beaverteeth92 I didn't know that. So it would be like having a president who spoke like Schwarzenegger?

Mrchocoborider  In his defense, Russian conjugation is fucking hard.

23092908 Related lore about the horrors of Russian conjugation:

"The genitive plural of a noun (used with a numeral to indicate five or more of something, as opposed to the dual, used for two, three, or four, see Russian nouns) is a rather unpredictable form of the Russian noun, and there are a handful of words which even native speakers have trouble producing this form of (either due to rarity or an actual lexical gap).

A common example of this is kocherga (fireplace poker). The joke is set in a Soviet factory. Five pokers are to be requisitioned. The correct forms are acquired, but as they are being filled out, a debate arises: what is the genitive plural of kocherga? Is it Kocherg? Kocherieg? Kochergov?... One thing is clear: a form with the wrong genitive plural of kocherga will bring disaster from the typically pedantic bureaucrats.

Finally, an old janitor overhears the commotion, and tells them to send in two separate requisitions: one for two kochergi and another for three kochergi. In some versions, they send in a request for 4 kochergi and one extra to find out the correct word, only to receive back "here are your 4 kochergi and one extra."

(In reality, a bureaucrat would likely resort to a trick like "Kocherga: 5 items"; a similar story by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer.)"

I loved being here.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1 2009, trns. Don Bartlett 

At home in our flat everything was us, there was no distance; if I was troubled, the flat was also troubled. But here there was distance, here the surroundings had nothing to do with me and mine, and they could shield me from whatever was troublesome.

258

Review: —All You Zombies—

Robert A. Heinlein, —All You Zombies— Written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction 

Doesn't quite work as a short, at least not in the compendiary, a-lick-and-a-promise manner Heinlein tells it. It's easy to see why it's considered a pinnacle of time-travel stories: it has that bold zeal that is so characteristic of so much modernist writing (and art) for embracing a novel idea, or a new architecture of possibilities, and pushing it to its logical extremes, and sometimes in this hurry, becoming so enamored with the tool to the detriment of its use. This is a well-constructed story; confident, filled with clever little innuendos and thematic winks and careful foreshadowing. But its brisk pace and utilitarian dialogue leaves no room for the characters to breathe and materialize. Add to this the cheapening effect of, despite all his visionary bravado, Heinlein's utter lack of ability to conceive a future where women might play any role other than being sexual comforters for men, and you get the picture. Real shame, since, as exemplified by the poignant final few lines of the story, at the heart of it all lies a profound solipsistic ennui. It should crescendo towards that—crashes into it instead.

We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1 2009, trns. Don Bartlett

I didn’t know what it was about these pictures that made such a great impression on me. However, it was striking that they were all painted before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it “happened,” where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world. When you didn’t just see the incomprehensible in it but came very close to it. Something that didn’t speak, and that no words could grasp, consequently forever out of our reach, yet within it, for not only did it surround us, we were ourselves part of it, we were ourselves of it. 

The fact that things other and mysterious were relevant to us had led my thoughts to angels, those mystical creatures who not only were linked to the divine but also to humanness, and therefore expressed the duality of the nature of otherness better than any other figure. At the same time there was something deeply dissatisfying about both the paintings and angels, since they both belonged to the past in such a fundamental way, that part of the past we have put behind us, that is, which no longer fit in, into this world we had created where the great, the divine, the solemn, the holy, the beautiful, and the true were no longer valid entities but quite the contrary, dubious or even laughable. This meant that the great beyond, which until the Age of Enlightenment had been the Divine, brought to us through the Revelation, and which in Romanticism was nature, where the concept of Revelation was expressed as the sublime, no longer found expression. In art, that which was beyond was synonymous with society, or the human masses, which fully encompassed its concepts of validity. 

As far as Norwegian art is concerned, the break came with Munch; it was in his paintings that, for the first time, man took up all the space. Whereas man was subordinate to the Divine through to the Age of Enlightenment, and to the landscape he was depicted in during Romanticism – the mountains are vast and intense, the sea is vast and intense, even the trees are vast and intense while humans, without exception, are small – the situation is reversed with Munch. It is as if humans swallow upeverything, make everything theirs. The mountains, the sea, the trees, and the forests, everything is colored by humanness. Not human actions and external life, but human feelings and inner life. And once man had taken over, there seemed not to be a way back, as indeed there was no way back for Christianity as it began to spread like wildfire across Europe in the first centuries of our era. Man is gestalted by Munch, his inner life is given an outer form, the world is shaken up, and what was left after the door had been opened was the world as a gestalt: with painters after Munch it is the colors themselves, the forms themselves, not what they represent, that carry the emotion. Here we are in a world of images where the expression itself is everything, which of course means that there is no longer any dynamism between the outer and the inner, just a division. In the modernist era the division between art and the world was close to absolute, or put another way, art was a world of its own. What was taken up in this world was of course a question of individual taste, and soon this taste became the very core of art, which thus could and, to a certain degree in order to survive, had to admit objects from the real world. The situation we have arrived at now whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, all the emphasis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what it thinks, what ideas it carries, such that the last remnants of objectivity, the final remnants of something outside the human world have been abandoned. Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore. Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality, have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an as one might expect, all those who have occupied themselves with the neutral, the negative, the nonhuman in art, have turned to language, that is where the incomprehensible and the otherness have been sought, as if they were to be found on the margins of human expression, on the fringes of what we understand, and of course, actually, that is logical: where else would it be found in a world that no longer acknowledges that there is a beyond? 

It is in this light we have to see the strangely ambiguous role death has assumed. On the one hand, it is all around us, we are inundated by news of deaths, pictures of dead people; for death, in that respect, there are no limits, it is massive, ubiquitous, inexhaustible. But this is death as an idea, death without a body, death as thought and image, death as an intellectual concept. This death is the same as the word “death,” the bodiless entity referred to when a dead person’s name is used. For while the person is alive the name refers to the body, to where it resides, to what it does; the name becomes detached from the body when it dies and remains with the living, who, when they use the name, always mean the person he was, never the person he is now, a body which lies rotting somewhere. This aspect of death, that which belongs to the body and is concrete, physical and material, this death is hidden with such great care that it borders on a frenzy, and it works, just listen to how people who have been involuntary witnesses to fatal accidents or murders tend to express themselves. They always say the same, it was absolutely unreal , even though what they mean is the opposite. It was so real. But we no longer live in that reality. For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real. And death, death is the last great beyond. That is why it has to be kept hidden. Because death might be beyond the term and beyond life, but it is not beyond the world.

221-226

Memorable moments in anime, 2014

© Japan, Spoilers ahoy

Here are a couple of scenes of some importance to me, from anime shows that aired last year. It is not an exhaustive list in any sense: 2014 was a solid year for anime, and I watched many, probably too many of them, but it would be impossible and meaningless to go through all of it to look for 'good scenes' regardless of their personal impact on me, merely for the sake of assembling a hefty pile. These are just some scenes, then, which moved me on a visceral level, which represented moments crucial or distinctive enough to make me remember them off the top of my head, months after I had seen them. They are presented in no particular order (other than awesomeness (but not really)).

Mushishi Seashell Birds ep. 02

Mushishi is a gift. It is Art, in all the cliched yet gravely beautiful senses of the word. It arrests you in that particular condition where, having all your pretensions to intellectual evaluation reduced to irrelevancy, you are left with only lofty words like Pathos, or Human Condition, or Grace, or Mercy to describe what is before you. It is a reminder why, despite all the countless valid reasons you may have against the idea, it is still worth watching anime because, in the words of Hideaki Anno, “only Japanese animation really explores our interior world and emotions”. There is no ‘Mushishi of American TV’, and there won’t be.

This scene, ending the second episode of second season of Mushishi, depicts the moment when the girl, Mina, is finally being released from the shackles of an emotional and physical confinement and repression she and everyone else in her village was forced into for so long. None of them had done anything wrong, and yet, as that most Japanese of sentiments dictates, there was nothing they could’ve done. This scene symbolizes the only way out of that conundrum—acceptance, forgiveness and hope—in one sweeping motion (quite literally), though you’d have to watch the whole episode to see how.

Ping Pong Listening to the Wind ep. 01

Even just being a Chinese person portrayed sympathetically in an anime would be interesting enough, but Wenge Kong went far and beyond that. He had a concise, but gracefully told background (his relationship with his mother, his place in the Chinese team he was forced out of), displayed various character traits that developed and changed over a wonderful personal arc in which he started out as a frustrated, pompous reject who put up a terse front yet couldn't hide his genuine love of the sport (as seen in this very scene), then gradually learned to appreciate others, accept failure as a part of life, and moved on to become one of the warmest, most dedicated people of the ensemble, and found a real home for himself in a foreign country (a sentiment that reached its peak and sealed by a beautiful musical interlude, the one you’ll see next).

Ping Pong Lonely Christmas Eve, Silent Night ep. 06

This karaoke scene instantly reminded me of that sequence from the movie Magnolia, both in terms of emotional impact and as a device to pull all your characters together under a single, shared cinematic moment so instead of semi-random occupiers of adjacent storylines they feel like a real ensemble cast moulding the same experience together. It is said to be based on the official music video of the song (Midnight Flight by Shogo Hamada). I did find some additional info on the song itself, but not the video.

Kaguya-hime Children's Song

Princess Kaguya knows the song, though she doesn’t know why she knows it. She knows of the world, of the birds, bugs and beasts, and of the grass, trees and the flowers, but this knowledge is already tainted with a sense of loss and disconnect. With a sense of not belonging. Of Geworfenheit. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya was as devastating as Isao Takahata’s other tearjerker The Grave of the Fireflies. It was like a heavy punch in the gut, in slow motion. The longest sigh ever, filmed. And this scene was just the first hint of what’s to come.

Kaguya-hime Running Away

Kaguya-hime was also one of the most powerfully feminist films I’ve seen lately. Of the best kind: where feminism is not an ideological baton, but an aspect of the narrative that naturally arises from the story, because the filmmaker is simply a decent humanbeing staring into the realities of the world, unflinching. The situation depicted in this scene here is not novel in any way (a girl, being forced into becoming an object of fantasy and lust for men) but the expressiveness of the animation (and music) is so spectacularly strong that it doesn’t lose any power from its intended impact. (Also note that the moon imagery is not arbitrary, but you have to watch the film to learn why).

Kaguya-hime Emperor's Visit

This is an almost-rape scene, so be warned. I thought that the way Kaguya-hime responds to the Emperor’s ‘advances’, not by screaming and kicking, but by stiffening both physically and emotionally, by shutting down, by refusing to be there in that same moment and space with the perpetrator, at least in her mind, however she can… was a more powerful image than most other scenes in other films where a similar situation is depicted. There is no ‘correct’ response to sexual violation of course, and there ought to be various shapes this response takes, because of the simple fact that everyone is different, but I suspect that this particular portrayal in Kaguya-hime is in fact, the more common one, too.

Shirobako Arupin is Here! ep. 02

‘Moe’ used to imply a sense of protectorship and dedication you developed towards an anime character, or at least I think it used to, whereas nowadays it simply means ‘cuteness with a mild sexual appeal’. Shirobako is a special show, not only because it provides a non-glorified, realistic, yet still non-cynical depiction of the anime industry from the inside, with a delightful running meta-commentary on itself, but also because it puts moe back where it belongs*. This scene is a wonderful sample of that pure joy and love that—ideally—goes into animation and animated characters.

*Barakamon did this too.

nini

Just watch.

A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.

Carl Andre

On learned ignorance

Nicolaus Cusanus, De Docta Ignorantia 1440

The universe has no circumference, for if it had a centre and a circumference there would be some and some thing beyond the world, suppositions which are wholly lacking in truth. Since, therefore, it is impossible that the universe should be enclosed within a corporeal centre and corporeal boundary, it is not within our power to understand the universe, whose centre and circumference are God. And though the universe cannot be infinite, nevertheless it cannot be conceived as finite since there are no limits within which it could be confined.

…

Life, as it exists on Earth in the form of men, animals and plants, is to be found, let us suppose in a high form in the solar and stellar regions. Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled – and that with beings perhaps of an inferior type – we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions …. Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know still less having no standards by which to appraise them.

A most uneasy mental spar between two gentlemen

Douglas Adams, a shorter version of a story from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish as recounted later in The Salmon of Doubt

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.

Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

For the letter slayeth

2 Corinthians 3 (NKJV)

4 And we have such trust through Christ toward God. 5 Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant—not of the letter but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

An I and a We but no You

From an interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard on The Paris Review by Jesse Barron

Is there any point in thinking of Min Kamp as a kind of confession in the Augustinian sense, like a spiritual autobiography?

There certainly is a longing in the book for that dimension. But it’s never something I thought of stylistically.

So maybe I’m wrong about Augustine, but you’ve studied the Bible, right? You translated some of it. Your second novel concerns a pretty traditional theological question—can the nature of the divine change? I can’t help feeling that you have a deep realtionship to religious writing, something beyond the typical modern longing for a “spiritual” dimension of life.

This really is difficult to talk about, I have to say.

For two years, I worked as a kind of adviser on a team that translated the Bible to Norwegian. It was there I learned to read. The gap between the two languages was a shock, and made it possible to experience, not only to recognize, the gap between language and the world, the arbitrariness everybody talked about in the eighties was all of a sudden visible for me.

Another lesson was that in the Old Testament, everything is concrete, nothing is abstract. God is concrete, the angels are concrete, and everything else has to do with bodies in motion, what they say, what they do, but never what they think. No speculations, no reflections. Even the metaphors are connected to bodies. I became especially interested in the story of Cain and Abel, when Cain’s countenance falls and God says, “Why is your countenance fallen? Lift up!” Cain doesn’t look anyone in the eyes, and no one looks in his. This is to hide from the world and from the other. And that is dangerous.

In the sixth book of Min Kamp, I wrote four hundred pages on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Hitler was a man who lived a year without seeing anyone, just sitting in his room reading, and when he left that room, never let anyone close, and stayed that way, intransigent, through the rest of his life, and one characteristic thing with his book, is that there is an “I,” and a “we,” but no “you.” And while I was writing about Hitler, a young Norwegian who had stayed some two years all by himself, and written a manifesto with a strong “I” and a “we,” also without a “you,” massacred sixty-nine youths on an island. In other words, his countenance fell.

The gap between the language and the world, the emphasis on the material aspects of the world, and Hitler writing Mein Kampf led me to Paul Celan, because the language he wrote in was destroyed by the Nazis. He couldn’t write blood, which circulated in his veins, or soil, which he walked on. Suddenly neither word represented something general, which implicated a we, for the we in this language was not his we.

So his final poem about the Holocaust is a poem where every word seems to be created for the first time, all singular, for the we is lost, from an abyss, a nothingness, and in this, something other than history is visible, namely, the outside of language, which really is unthinkable, because thoughts are language, but it’s still present, still there. It’s the world, out of reach for us, and it is death.

Into dust and smoke

From an interview on Syria Deeply with the Italian journalist Francesca Borri 

What is your most striking memory from your recent trip to Aleppo, the moment you'll never forget?

Borri: During my first days in Aleppo in October 2012, the first weeks of the battle, I was with a group of freelance journalists. We were under heavy mortar fire and at one point we had to rush to seek shelter. We found a building that was packed with women, children and families, and there was no space for me to enter. There wasn’t even a square meter. An old man came out and told me that I had to come in – he said my life was more important than his because I, as a journalist, could tell the world what was happening in Syria. I remember this old man disappearing into dust and smoke … this image will be with me till my last day as a journalist.

Not that schu

From the Wikipedia article on Schumann

Schumann has not often been confused with Austrian composer Franz Schubert, but one well-known example occurred in 1956, when East Germany issued a pair of postage stamps featuring Schumann's picture against an open score that featured Schubert's music. The stamps were soon replaced by a pair featuring music written by Schumann.

Overwhelming

Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996 org. The Power of the Single Shot, Ikiru laser disc; October 1, 1993

To confess, I can praise Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker to the heavens, but I haven’t actually seen the whole film. I probably only saw the last third, and then just happened to see it on television. But that was enough for me. I was overwhelmed and had no desire to see more. This sometimes happens out of laziness. I know that if I were to watch films all the way through, their emotional impact would be greater. And I know the film's creator wants us to watch his or her film all the way through. But with Stalker, I was thrilled to the bottom of my heart. To watch anymore would have been too much.

159

This is modernism

Drew Calvert, Better Angels: On Rilke in Translation

Business first

Rilke: New Poems, a collection of youthful verse translated by Joseph Cadora, marks the latest contribution to Rilke studies in English. Originally published in 1907 and 1908 in two volumes, these two hundred poems represent a period of intense creativity, including Rilke’s first attempts to broach the theme of heavenly beings. Cadora’s translation of “The Angel” stresses their predatory nature:

Do not burden his buoyant hands, for perhaps those very hands might materialize to painfully examine you by night, to go raging through the household, clutching as if they created you, and might in this manner break you out of your mold.

This is a fascinating departure from Stephen Mitchell’s translation, according to which, on that fateful night, the threatening seraph’s “light” hands

would come more fiercely to interrogate you, and rush to seize you blazing like a star, and bend you as if trying to create you, and break you open, out of who you are.

To be broken out of who we are: is this what we’re hoping for? Is this why we turn to poetry? Robert Hass, who wrote the introduction to Mitchell’s, and now Cadora’s, book, claims that the Elegies are “an argument against our lived, ordinary lives.” They were written, after all, during a time when ordinary life was becoming increasingly corporatized; the composition itself was delayed by petty bourgeois concerns. As Hass tells it, one morning in late January of 1922, Rilke received a troubling business letter. He took a stroll around the castle of his wealthy friend and patron, wondering how to respond. At some point, he was inspired to write the poems that would define his career. First, he answered the business letter, and then he dealt with his cosmic vision. This is “Modernism.” 

Christ the telephone

In any case, Rilke’s angels aren’t reducible to those flitting through the Christian tradition. In 1921, he wrote in a letter that he was becoming anti-Christian—in fact, he was studying the Koran:

Surely the best alternative was Muhammad, breaking like a river through prehistoric mountains toward the one god with whom one may communicate so magnificently each morning without this telephone we call “Christ” into which people repeatedly call “Hello, who’s there?” although there is no answer.

Are Rilke’s angels Islamic, then? Maybe, but that’s obscuring the point.