The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel. He wrote it while living in Paris as a young writer. It contains autobiographical content and was inspired in part by the expressionistic movement.

From Book One

But, Master, were a virginal spirit to lie with innocent ear beside your sound: he would die of blessedness, or he would gestate infinite things and his impregnated brain would burst with so much birth.

Reflection

It all seems so inconsequential.
The artlessness of it. I seem to forget under my moth-eaten quilts. My room is sometimes cold.
Freight cars rumble along a dreary, well-worn track. The train head bellows.
The sound measures the miles between me and it, and I wake.
And then I remember. There it is. I slept too long.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel. He wrote it while living in Paris as a young writer. It contains autobiographical content and was inspired in part by the expressionistic movement.

From Book One

My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

Reflection

This is an expression of one of Rilke’s recurring themes, an idea that preoccupied him, that we are truly alone. That all of our innermost perceptions—the beauty we see in the world, the diaphanous rays of the morning sun through a casement window, light crystals flashing on ocean waters, the breeze on our faces, almost wet with renewal—that how we perceive these things, how they make us feel, that only we alone can feel them that way, and because of that, we are utterly alone with the world and with our God. We may try to write them down, or paint them on a canvas. But it is just a futile attempt, a desperate attempt, to hide ourselves from this awful, unalterable truth.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is Rilke’s only novel. He wrote it while living in Paris as a young writer. It contains autobiographical content and was inspired in part by the expressionistic movement.

From Book One

I am lying in my bed, five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a dial without hands. As a thing long lost lies one morning in its old place, safe and well, fresher almost than at the time of its loss, quite as though someone had cared for it—: so here and there on my coverlet lie lost things out of my childhood and are as new.

Commentary

This morning
Is like a place I’ve never been before.
The coolness of it laps over my feet buried in wet sand. It feels like silk.
Back and forth. Reaching for my senses.
Such joy these waters of day fold and unfold again.
It blinds me with happiness. There should be no more thoughts.