To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich (Switzerland) 
 November 19, 1920 
 
 De grace: if I am not yet entirely lost to you (I slip through 
 fingers like . . . "desert sand") and you have not yet thoroughly 
 denounced me for failing to come, then lose yourself awhile in 
 this little picture: even if I don't really deserve it. For now the 
 dice, which pointed with all their spots toward you, have been 
 picked up once more and thrown anew and the result, I am con- 
 tinuing to stay in hospitable Switzerland and, as you can almost 
 see by this [card], Schloss Berg on the Irchel ... is to be my 
 abode for the next months, perhaps for the winter. Under con- 
 ditions somewhat resembling those in Duino: that was what set- 
 tled it for me. I live alone in the solid, centuries-old stone house, 
 alone with a housekeeper who cares for me as silently as I silently 
 let myself be cared for; a deserted park opening on the quiet land- 
 scape, no railway station in the neighborhood and for the present, 
 furthermore, a lot of roads closed on account of foot-and-mouth 
 disease done, retraite absolue. 
 
 It happened so suddenly, without my doing the least thing about 
 it, simply offered itself, I could not resist. More particularly as 
 the choice was put to me at a remarkable moment. I came you 
 will not guess from where dear Princess I came from Paris, 
 where I had just as unexpectedly spent six days, indescribable 
 autumn days, glorious ones, and it was ... to an extent that 
 far exceeded all expectation my Paris, the Paris of former days 
 I would like to say: the eternal Paris. Anyone now visiting chiefly 
 the rive droite, dependent on personal connections and altogether 
 on society and conversation, would certainly have to admit many 
 sad and disfiguring changes. But I have the singular good fortune 
 to live through things, and so far as any influence came to me 
 from them and from the intensive air, it was the old, indescribable 
 one, the same to which almost twenty years ago I owed my best 
 and most resolute frame of mind. I cannot say (but you will 
 guess! ) with what emotion I enjoyed these contacts, how I held 
 myself against a hundred intimate broken surfaces, the healing 
 on to which remained but a matter of self-abandonment. And 
 that, believe me! I did not lack. Only now have I the hope again 
 of carrying on, really continuing my work, and I came back 
 with a real impatience for it , then Schloss Berg offered itself. 
 And instead of handing myself over and delivering myself up to 
 a long journey, to the tasks that would have awaited me in 
 Munich, and so and so many unforeseen things that I would have 
 had to attend to before Lautschin, I drove blindly from Geneva 
 hither and closed my old oaken doors. Now I have been here a 
 week, and the experiment speaks for my staying on. Dear Prin- 
 cess: absolution. More: your blessing on it! . . . 
 
 To R.S. y 'who in sending in manuscripts, called special attention to 
 his having gone blind. Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 November 22, 1920 
 
 Your letter of October 1 6th went a long way round to reach 
 me; so my delay is not quite so great as it might seem. 
 
 Now as to my answer, it is more concerned with your letter 
 than with the work you enclosed. My conscience does not allow 
 me to express "judgment", since I know how much I lack the 
 movable yardsticks for appraising the more or less in artistic 
 endeavors; I have no link with the manifestations of art other than 
 that of admiration, and so I am in every way made, while I live, to 
 be pupil to the greatest and their acknowledger, rather than find- 
 ing myself able to act as adviser to those who have not yet truly 
 found their way into the essential nature of their tasks. For these 
 I may only wish that they hold joyfully to the road of longest 
 learning, until there comes to them that deep and hidden self- 
 assuredness which without their having to ask anyone about 
 it pure necessity, that is, irrepressibility and thoroughness 
 of their work secures to them. To hold our innermost conscience 
 alert, which with every fully formed experience tells us whether 
 it is thus, as it now stands, altogether to be answered for in its 
 truthfulness and integrity: that is the foundation of every artistic 
 production, which ought to be laid even there where an inspira- 
 tion kept in suspense can, so to speak, do without the ground. 
 
 Great decisive misfortune, such as has been your lot, is singu- 
 larly enticing to those winged inspirations that like to settle down 
 wherever a privation has become greater than any possession we 
 can imagine. You could not help simply setting this consummate 
 misfortune, when you noticed how attractive it is to the in- 
 visible and spiritual, in the center of your rearranged conscious- 
 ness; it remains, rightly, the unshiftable point from which all dis- 
 tances and movements of your experience and your mind are to 
 be measured. But now that this arrangement has once been hit 
 upon, your quiet practice should be directed toward enduring this 
 central misfortune more and more without any special name, and 
 this would manifest itself in your artistic efforts somewhat in this 
 way: that nowhere any more would it be possible to recognize 
 in them 'what limitless restriction is the occasion for your laying 
 claim in the earnest entreaty of your work to limitless compensa- 
 tion. Art can proceed only from a purely anonymous center. 
 But for your life too (whatever else it may be destined to bring 
 forth) this endeavor seems to me decisive; it would be the real 
 kernel of your resignation. While you bore your misfortune as a 
 nameless and then at last unnamable suffering, you would be pre- 
 paring for it the freedom of being at certain moments not mis- 
 fortune alone but: dispensation ( who can see that far ) : priv- 
 ilege. Unequivocal destinies of that sort have their god and are 
 thereby forever distinguished from those variously complicative 
 fates whose privations are not deep enough and not closely enough 
 joined to serve as negative mold for the casting of such a greatly 
 responsible form. 
 
 To Countess M. Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 November 25, 1920 
 
 . . . How has this come about? It has come about by a mira- 
 cle. There's no other way of accounting for it. How shall I 
 hasten to impart to you the incomprehensible thing that has be- 
 fallen me? Imagine, the same privilege that allowed me to go 
 to Paris has, so to speak, had a second act in that, at the moment 
 of my return, the remote little old Schlosschen Berg was offered 
 me (to me, all alone! ) as an abode for the winter. You can see it 
 fairly well on the enclosed card: a solid old house of hewn stone, 
 dating back in its last form to the seventeenth century, with a 
 set-back gable roof seen from the side, in the front a somewhat 
 neglected park, in which high trimmed beech alleys mark out 
 right and left the unbordered piece d'eau, in the center of which, 
 day and night, like a playing tree (un arbre de luxe) the fountain- 
 figure stands slim. (And this, with its continually modulated 
 cascade, is indeed the measure of all sounds, seldom can anything 
 be heard above it! ) Looking in the direction opposite from that 
 given by the card, out of one of the windows (mine are those 
 on the ground floor) into the garden, one sees it in the back- 
 ground, beyond the wide-set alley of old chestnuts, running on 
 into the landscape, into meadows which, in gentlest ascent, reach 
 up to the foot of the Irchel, that wooded hill which gives way, as 
 it were, closing the picture without perceptibly shutting it in. 
 My rooms are fine, large, full of sympathetic old things big tile 
 stoves, in addition to the fireplace, provide the heating and 
 whenever the sun is out it shines radiantly in at all my windows. 
 A quiet sensible housekeeper looks after me, exactly as I need 
 to be looked after, and doesn't seem to show any particular sur- 
 prise at my being silent and reserved (for so I must be in order 
 to get at work!) I've been telling a fairy tale, have I not? 
 Well, what do you say to my being the center of that tale, un- 
 expectedly? Am I really happy? No, my heart beats with worry 
 over whether I shall be able to wrest from these conditions, to the 
 last degree favorable and congenial, that which they now at last 
 really allow and which I (after all the distractions and disturb- 
 ances of the last years) must urgently, unrelentingly expect of 
 myself. Now there's no excuse! Shall I be able to do it? Shall I 
 be strong, clean, fruitful, productive?: the having seen Paris 
 again, which was so healing, obliges me to be, and here this ob- 
 ligation is now really so clearly and unambiguously set up round 
 about me , if I fail this time, here, at Schloss Berg then there 
 is no help for me. The first thing a stranger walking in here 
 would say is: How one must be able to work here! Shall I be 
 able to do it? My fear (my cowardice, if you want to call it that) 
 is just as great as my joy, but that joy is really immense. 
 From a place like this ... I can measure doubly well how 
 sad it must be for you to give up your Carinthian estate: it is true, 
 an indescribable amount of life goes into a piece of permanent 
 property one has built up, and this cannot be pulled out when one 
 gets into the position of giving the place away. Here the Escher 
 portraits, such as have remained in the chateau, still predominate 
 over everything that the Zieglers, despite four children grown up 
 here, have been able to impose upon the surroundings! 
 The mourning border on your letter I explained to myself at 
 once, even before I read it , in the sense of that great near loss 
 that had unfortunately lain not outside the realm of a certain ex- 
 pectation. It is true, one must, particularly under the present bot- 
 tomless conditions, muster a sort of reconciliation with the going 
 of those who would not have been able to endure such great 
 changes without continual amazement and suffering. I myself 
 could scarcely get possession of myself or get at my work if I had 
 to notice too much of the helplessnesses that everywhere don't 
 want to admit they are that, but in the form of false certainties, 
 would like to overpower the world. 
 Had I wanted and been able to "profit" by the exchange in 
 Switzerland I would perhaps have become strong enough to ac- 
 quire your Carinthian estate I say that jokingly, of course but 
 still with the thought in the back of my mind that perhaps the 
 original home of the family, which I have never learned to know, 
 would be the country where a comparatively homelike striking 
 of roots (should I ever get to it) would come to me not unnatu- 
 rally. 
 For the spring I am thinking of Paris anyway to continue 
 the life there would seem to me the most perfectly straightfor- 
 ward thing that could happen to me. But, in any case, as I remain 
 dependent on Insel-Verlag as concerns my income, it is not ex- 
 actly to be foreseen how the disastrous German exchange is to 
 serve me in the realization of this plan. 
 No I was not longer in Paris, six days. It was so perfect that 
 duration played no role. My heart, my mind, my passionate re- 
 membrance of what had there been achieved and fought for were 
 so magnificently and surely satisfied in the very first hour, that 
 when that was over I might have left without any real depriva- 
 tion. I long ago accustomed myself to take given things accord- 
 ing to their intensity, without, so far as that is humanly achievable, 
 worrying about duration; that is perhaps the best and discreetest 
 way of expecting everything from them even duration. If one 
 begins with that demand, one spoils and falsifies every experience, 
 indeed, one hinders it in its own inmost inventiveness and fruit- 
 fulness. Something that is really not to be got by entreaty, can 
 never be but an extra gift, and I was just thinking that often in 
 life things seem to depend only on the longest patience! . . . 
 That I ever should have grumbled! 
 
 To Major-General von Sedlakoivitz Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 December 9, 1920 
 
 Your letter and its duplicate were forwarded to me by the 
 Insel-Verlag as soon as I was again to be reached at a more per- 
 manent address, after several months on the move. 
 
 Had I acted on the feeling aroused by your remote recollec- 
 tion, I must have thanked you at once , and you thought it a 
 little strange too, as the repetition of your letter shows, not to get 
 any answer from me. 
 
 Meanwhile the emotion that agitated me was so complex that 
 I had to let a few weeks pass, comprehending it, as it were, if my 
 thanks were not to be superficial and, in a certain sense, em- 
 barrassed, which would in no way have satisfied your sincere 
 wish to renew acquaintance. 
 
 A voice that appeals to those most distant years (it is the only 
 such voice that ever sought to find me!) was bound at first you 
 will pardon the directness of my expression to be incredible. I 
 would not, I believe, have been able to realize my life that which 
 I may now, without taking it in the whole, go ahead and call so 
 had I not, for decades, denied and suppressed all recollection of 
 those five years of my military training; what, indeed, have I 
 not done for the sake of that suppression! There were times when 
 the slightest influence out of that rejected past would have dis- 
 integrated that new and fruitful consciousness of my own that 
 I was struggling for , and when sometimes it inwardly obtruded 
 itself, I had to lift myself out over it, as over something belonging 
 to a most alien, a quite unrecognizable life. But later too, when 
 I found myself more surrounded and protected in a life increas- 
 ingly my own, that affliction of my childhood, long and violent 
 and far beyond my age at the time, seemed incomprehensible to 
 me , and I was able to understand its impenetrable fatality just 
 as little as the miracle that finally perhaps at the last moment 
 came to free me from the abyss of undeserved misery. 
 
 If you, Sir, find exaggerated the embitterment without which 
 even today still I cannot so much as enumerate those facts of my 
 early life, I beg you to consider for a moment that when I left 
 the military college, I stood as one exhausted, physically and spir- 
 itually misused, retarded, at sixteen, before my life's enormous 
 tasks, defrauded of the most spontaneous part of my energy and 
 at the same time of that preparation, never again retrievable, which 
 would have built me clean steps for an ascent that, weakened and 
 damaged, I had now to begin before the steepest walls of my 
 future. 
 
 You hear me state all this and you will ask, how then was it 
 conceivable to retrieve these indescribable things I had missed 
 and head into the paths along which my original instincts could 
 still drive me ahead, weary as I was: this question it probably was 
 which made you doubt for so long my identity with the "pupil 
 Rene Rilke". I cannot tell how such a thing could have happened 
 either. Life is very singularly made to surprise us (where it does 
 not utterly appall us) . Of course I looked around for help in those 
 years of dismay; much as I remained apart for my contempo- 
 raries were in a normal and incomparably clearer position and did 
 not come into consideration as companions for me I was not 
 spared the drawing of comparisons and the realizing ever anew 
 what entirely different preliminaries I might have expected for 
 my talent. That did not help me. But it is present to me even now, 
 how, in my moroseness, I found a kind of help in those five evil 
 and anxious years of my childhood having been so utterly cruel, 
 without a single mitigation. 
 
 Dear Sir, do not think me unjust: I imagine I have achieved a 
 certain degree of fairness and I wish for nothing more than some 
 day to be allowed to recognize even in the boundless suffering of 
 those years those brighter spots in which because there was no 
 longer any other way some kindness befell me as if by chance. 
 For the workings of Nature penetrate far into the unnatural, and 
 an attempt at striking a balance might occasionally take place even 
 there. But how slight that was measured against the daily despair 
 of a ten-, a twelve-, a fourteen-year-old boy. 
 
 So for individual later moments of my youth I had to be 
 granted the support of including that which happened so long 
 ago in the feeling of one single terrible damnation, out of which I 
 was cast up merely as out of a sea that is stirred to its depths with 
 destructive intent and is not even concerned whether it leaves here 
 and there upon its devastated shore a live thing or a dead. 
 
 When in more reflective years (for how late I arrived at a state 
 where I could read calmly, not just to make up for lost time, but 
 purely receptively!) Dostoievski's Memoirs of a Death-house 
 first came into my hands, it seemed to me that since my tenth 
 year I had been admitted into all the terrors and despairs of the 
 convict prison! Please take all the pathos out of this statement. It 
 means to express nothing but a simple recognition of an inner 
 state the external causes of which I will admit at once were 
 different enough from the surroundings of Siberian convicts. But 
 Dostoievski, when he endured the unendurable, was a young 
 man, a grown man; to the mind of a child the prison walls of St. 
 Polten could, if he used the measure of his helplessly abandoned 
 heart, take on pretty much the same dimensions. 
 
 Twenty years ago it was, I spent some time in Russia. An in- 
 sight, prepared only in a very general way by the reading of 
 Dostoievski's works, developed, in that country where I felt so 
 at home, into a most penetrating clarity; it is hard to formulate. 
 Something like this, perhaps: The Russian showed me in so many 
 examples how even a servitude and affliction continually over- 
 powering all forces of resistance need not necessarily bring about 
 the destruction of the soul. There is here, at least for the Slavic 
 soul, a degree of subjection that deserves to be called so consum- 
 mate that, even under the most ponderous and burdensome op- 
 pression, it provides the soul with something like a secret play- 
 room, a fourth dimension of its existence, in which, however 
 crushing conditions become, a new, endless and truly inde- 
 pendent freedom begins for it. 
 
 Was it presumptuous of me to imagine that I had, instinctively, 
 achieved a similar complete submission and resignation in those 
 earliest years, when that block of an impenetrable misery had been 
 rolled over the tenderest first shoots of my nature? I had, it seems 
 to me, some right (with an altered standard naturally) to assume 
 something of the sort, since indeed of any other endurance of 
 disproportionate, ovcr-lifesize wrong there is nowhere any indi- 
 cation. 
 
 So I hope you realize that even a long time ago I undertook 
 to enter upon a certain reconciliation with my older destinies. 
 As they had not destroyed me they must at some time have been 
 laid upon the scales of my life as additional weights , and the 
 counterweights that were destined to bring the other side into 
 balance could be made up only of the purest performance, to 
 which, too, I found myself determined after those days of mine 
 in Russia. 
 
 If thus I no longer suppressed altogether the old days in military 
 school, I still could admit them only in the large and in general, 
 somewhere behind me. For an examination or even a reconstruc- 
 tion of details my energies, otherwise busy in any case and work- 
 ing toward the future, would never have sufficed. 
 
 So that when you speak to me of some particular recollection, 
 as happens in your letter, I should have difficulty in unexpectedly 
 describing such memories, never having cultivated them. 
 
 The irony you manifested for my writings must have been a 
 highly justified and educational one, even that fragment from 
 the later letter of 1892 (!) shows indeed how very right one 
 would have been even then in strictly and severely trimming the 
 ragged and crinkled edges of my expression! 
 
 That you incidentally kept that letter among your papers and 
 were even able to find it again, fills me, my dear teacher, with a 
 peculiar emotion, which I may hide the less as nowhere in these 
 brusque remarks have I yet thanked you for your new sympathetic 
 communication. It is done at this point, believe me, without any 
 reservation. 
 
 Must I, in conclusion, reproach myself for having gone into so 
 much detail and above all to such a length? Should I have taken 
 the renewal of acquaintance in your kind letter more "uncon- 
 cernedly"? No; I believe that for me there was only the choice, 
 either to remain silent or really to let you take part in the emotion 
 which the only voice that has ever come across to me from thence 
 was bound to arouse in me. 
 
 If you, Sir, can take this unusual answer in a sense as just as it 
 is forbearing, then you will also feel that I cannot close in any 
 other way than with the expression of sincere wishes for your 
 welfare. How should I not see a special privilege in your re- 
 membrance ever having afforded me the pleasure of expressing 
 them! 
 
 To Phia Rilke Schloss Berg am Irchel, Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 
 December 17, 1920 
 My dear Mama, 
 
 Once more at our blessed hour, most loving remembrance of 
 Christmas days of longest ago, and the wish that now, after such 
 bad times, there may be granted you celebrations each year more 
 quiet, more peaceful, and finally too in a little home of your very 
 own again! 
 
 Now that this has been expressed, really everything has been 
 expressed, for now it is a matter not of reading, but of going-into- 
 oneselj and, in one's own heart, for the year's holiest hour of 
 celebration, preparing the manger, so that therein, this hour, and 
 in it the Savior, may with all fervor be born into the world again f 
 
 What I wish for you, dear Mama, is that on this evening of 
 consecration, the remembrance of all distress, even the conscious- 
 ness of the immediate worry and insecurity of existence may be 
 quite checked and in a sense dissolved in the innermost knowl- 
 edge of that grace, for which indeed no time is too dense with 
 calamity and no anxiety so sealed that in its own time which is 
 not ours! it could not enter and penetrate what seems insur- 
 mountable with its mild victory. There is no moment in the long 
 year when one would be able to call so vividly into one's soul its 
 ever possible appearance and then omnipresence, as this winter 
 night, autonomous through the centuries, which, through the in- 
 comparable coming of that child who transformed all creatures, 
 all at once outweighed and surpassed in value the sum of all other 
 earthly rights. Though the easy summer, when existence seems 
 considerably more bearable and more effortless, when we do not 
 have to guard ourselves against such direct antagonism from the 
 air and from serenely absorbed Nature , though the happier 
 summer may pamper us with consolations, what are they all be- 
 side the immeasurable comfort-treasures of this outwardly un- 
 assuming, even poor night that suddenly stands open toward the 
 inside, like an all-embracing and warming heart, and which with 
 beats of its own bell-toned center really does reply to our hearken- 
 ing into the innermost cell. 
 
 All annunciations of previous times did not suffice to herald 
 this night, all hymns that have been sung in its praise did not come 
 near the stillness and eagerness in which shepherds and kings knelt 
 down , just as we too, none of us, has ever been able, while this 
 miracle-night was befalling him, to indicate the measure of his 
 experience. 
 
 It is so truly the mystery of the kneeling, of the deeply kneeling 
 man: his being greater, by his spiritual nature, than he who stands! 
 which is celebrated in this night. He who kneels, who gives him- 
 self wholly to kneeling, loses indeed the measure of his surround- 
 ings, even looking up he would no longer be able to say what is 
 great and what is small. But although in his bent posture he has 
 scarcely the height of a child, yet he, this kneeling man, is not to be 
 called small. With him the scale is shifted, for in following the 
 peculiar weight and strength in his knees and assuming the position 
 jhat corresponds to them, he already belongs to that world in 
 
 
 
 which height is depth, and if even height remains im- 
 measurable to our gaze and our instruments: who could measure 
 the depth? . . . 
 
 But this is the night of radiant depth unfolded : for you, dear 
 Mama, may it be hallowed and blessed. Amen. Rene 
 
 To Carl Burckhardt Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 December 21, 1920 
 
 ... It came to the point where my life at Berg I may safely 
 refer to it by so inclusive a word, for right away it was of a peculiar 
 validity and realization where this life at once took on the dimen- 
 sions of work , whereby my letter-pen, so to say, fell under the 
 supervision of its stricter sister dedicated to production and only 
 now and then obtains a little freedom to let itself go for a few easy 
 pages. 
 
 For the same reason because everything here was at once so 
 conducive that from the second or third moment the most serious 
 things became unpostponable and the deeper work of inward ab- 
 sorption set in (for the true and uninterruptible taking up of 
 which no house has been solid and remote enough for me during 
 these last years) I did not go to Basel either, after all. To the 
 friendly understanding of your sister and the ever active kindness 
 of your mother I owe the sending over of my things; and with the 
 arrival of these trunks, boxes and baskets my existence here has 
 been complete; entirely shut off and remote as it was from the start, 
 the sudden snowfall has as it were moved house and park still 
 further off, and should even that not suffice, the regulations that 
 have been issued on account of foot-and-mouth disease see to it that 
 the strictly closed roads not only make any coming here to me, 
 but also my going out, practically impossible. My inner confusion, 
 into which so much disturbance had penetrated during the world- 
 disasters, needs such a shutting-off for a while exaggerated, if 
 you will to set itself in order; I must really be able to be sure that 
 for a long time nothing save what may come from Nature or be 
 engendered through incommensurable activities inside oneself 
 that nothing comes up, if I am to get through at all with every- 
 thing that fills my mind to overflowing; not because it would be 
 too much, but because I would not have the strength to put it by 
 in obedient and significant form. So I best sum up my present 
 condition when I say that it answers to all my inclinations; what 
 might somehow be disturbing about it would at most be this, that 
 the wonderful congeniality of it lays upon me the extreme obliga- 
 tion to produce; but as of course I want nothing but that this 
 bringing to completion at last of interrupted and imperiled tasks 
 , we will manage (so far as human strength suffices) to come to 
 terms on this point too. 
 
 What a blessing that I had those days in Paris beforehand! 
 Without this connection with my earlier existence (with all my 
 difficult years of learning), through which alone my full con- 
 sciousness was once more set in order and, so to speak, the great 
 cycle of my spiritual breathing was opened again, the retirement at 
 Berg would not have been half so well prepared and provisioned. 
 This time one good thing was added to another and indeed one 
 would not have had enough with only one, after such long associa- 
 tion with unkind, malicious, uncongenial and sad things! . . . 
 
 You remember the forty drawings of my little (twelve-year- 
 old) friend Balthasar Klossowski, whose destiny was decided one 
 day, on the stroke of twelve, in the green room of the Ritterhof . 
 The publisher is actually getting them into the bookstores toward 
 spring. And I have begun my work here by sketching out the 
 promised "Preface", which, just as it lies before me full of 
 mistakes, I fear nevertheless pleases me because I wrote it down 
 very rapidly, in one good session, and can assure you I did not 
 translate it in an antechamber of my mind, but, franchement et 
 heureusement, thought it in French. Despite that, this little per- 
 sonal infatuation with an unexpectedly easy success would not 
 justify my forcing this essay upon you (in a copy made for you) . 
 Although these pages deal with "Mitsou" the tomcat and will be 
 used as an introduction to the book of that name, yet I also see in 
 them (in reading you will understand why) since knowing of 
 the death of my friend "Prince" a kind of little memorial I was 
 unwittingly allowed to put up a few days before he ran into the 
 guns of the guards in the Biningen preserve. I know how this 
 closely attached friend, with his unrestrainable heart, sharing your 
 thoughts and feelings, had a part in many of your recollections, 
 and how much the news of his going must have moved you, 
 as though one of those understandings were now taken away 
 which, because they do not act "helpful" at all, are more helpful 
 and thoroughgoing than the most give-and-take conversations; 
 and into which life, always discreet, does after all, perhaps, trans- 
 fer the purest compensations we are allowed to experience out- 
 side ourselves. 
 
 What a good companion Prince was to me, you know. Odd 
 how he, who seemed to know that life and death are equally dif- 
 ficult only so can I ever express what his sigh, that single one 
 on that rainy night in May, seemed to impart to me was driven 
 into an accessible death, at that singular parting of the ways be- 
 yond which growing old would have set him against one of the 
 two, made him unjust toward life and sullen toward death. 
 
 So quite particularly in his, Prince's, honor, did I intend for 
 you the little piece in the accompanying copy; accept it with the 
 indulgence with which alone such an incidental thing should be 
 taken, and yet also in that larger sense about which, I believe, 
 we agree. . . . 
 
 P.S. I am searching for HofmannsthaPs Beethoven lecture, hav- 
 ing realized at once how very fine it must have been. 
 
 
 To Inga Junghanns Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 January 5, 1921 
 
 . . . Yes, how curiously things do happen in life; were there 
 not a bit of arrogance somewhere in it, one would indeed like 
 very much to stand outside, confronting everything, that is, 
 everything that occurs, so as surely not to lose anything ; one 
 would then still remain fixed, perhaps for the first time really so, 
 in the actual center of life, where everything comes together and 
 has no name; but then again, the names have bewitched us the 
 titles, the pretense of life because the whole is too infinite, and 
 we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, 
 much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the 
 wrong, makes us guilty, kills us ... 
 
 To Joachim von Wintetfeldt-Menkin Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich 
 February 2, 1921 
 
 ... I did not know Seckendorff , and ... it is really not my 
 custom to write about the plastic arts. Rodin's case is for me 
 wholly unique. Rodin was, as I might say, my teacher; the ex- 
 ample of his powerful work influenced me through many years 
 of learning, and from the friendly association of so many occa- 
 sions it was possible finally for a series of notes to precipitate out. 
 Even in the next case, when a painter's work that of Cezanne 
 had the greatest influence on me, I renounced any written state- 
 ment of my experience, as nothing seems to me less reliable than 
 literary analysis of painting or plastic production. The present 
 condition of the arts on the one hand and on the other the 
 uncommon agility and readiness of the word, obligate one to the 
 greatest economy and caution in expression; even the most respon- 
 sible writer is today more than ever in danger of exaggerating or 
 at least of prematurely appraising works of art that in any way 
 concern him, since it has not been possible to alter and adjust the 
 divisions of the measuring-scale in such detail as would correspond 
 to the modifications and variety in the flood of art production. 
 My part toward all this is the modest one of keeping silent and 
 this resolve of mine has for years been too much a matter of prin- 
 ciple for me not to stick to it even if Seckendorff's works had 
 been familiar and significant to me. . . . 
 
 To Franclsca Stoecklm Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich 
 March 8, 1921 (Tuesday) 
 
 I had taken your letter along yesterday on the post road to 
 Flaach and was reading it again as I walked; as I finished and 
 looked up, my glance involuntarily took in, on the right, in the 
 garden before a farmhouse, a little creature some five years of age. 
 The little girl, scarce looked-at, dropped everything and came 
 hurrying toward me, over her slanting round shoulder an open 
 umbrella (which because of its weight had slid so far back that 
 it made a complete background for her little person), over to 
 the road, her tiny right hand ready to offer, even from afar, open, 
 so open that the palm was almost convex , and when it then 
 actually succeeded, when the offer of this generous, eager, very 
 earthy and dirty little hand had been, with quickly hid astonish- 
 ment, accepted by me, the little girl experienced such deep con- 
 tentment and her little face radiated so much fulfillment and joy 
 that her whole expression no longer had any relation to the degree 
 of giving that might have been ours at that moment. 
 
 What was it? A mistake of the little person who took me for an 
 acquaintance, perhaps for the vicar of Flaach? (for in general, 
 friendly as children may be in greeting one orally, I have never 
 yet seen one of them take upon itself the charges of such a wel- 
 come) . Even if this elan was not meant for me, enough to make 
 one happy was still left over, and this it bestowed on me notwith- 
 standing. But now I have a better explanation for it (and for your 
 sake I am telling you the sweet incident). My gaze, as it left your 
 letter, must have been so friendly, so happy, so clarified with uni- 
 versal friendship, that the world now suddenly facing it knew no 
 other way to fill it out than with this pure spontaneous occurrence. 
 
 This is my impartial little story. . . . 
 
 To Countess M. Schloss Berg am Irchel, Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 
 March 10, 1921 
 
 I wanted to write you long, long ago! Now almost two months 
 have passed since the date of your letter , but I was living under 
 such great pressure that any communication would have been as if 
 distorted. I want to say right away that that did not happen to me 
 of which you so perspicaciously warned me a forcing, an urging, 
 impatient either-or toward work , no, not that. You wrote so 
 comfortingly and trustingly: "Your work, your art comes when it 
 will" yes, and it is that way , but then around New Year's, 
 it was there, it was there , and at the same moment circumstances 
 arose to meet me, urgent, difficult ones , that needed all of me 
 and to which I had to concede the right on the spot to tear me 
 forth and away from all that was just about to begin and for 
 which circumstances here were incomparably favorable and pre- 
 pared. A fatality: in effect exactly like that time in Munich when 
 I was just beginning to reflect and pull myself together, and 
 I was called up; of course it was no calling up this time, but some- 
 thing just as relentless, against which no protest could be of avail. 
 Everyone, in the last analysis, experiences only one conflict in 
 life, which only disguises itself differently all the time and shows 
 up somewhere else , mine is, to make life and work agree in a 
 purest sense; where the infinite incommensurable work of the 
 artist is concerned, the two directions are opposed. Many have 
 helped themselves by taking life lightly, surreptitiously snatching 
 from it, so to speak, what they did nevertheless need, or trans- 
 forming its values into intoxications the murky exaltation of which 
 they then swiftly flung over into art; others had no way out save 
 the turning away from life, asceticism, and this means is of course 
 cleaner and truer by far than that other greedy cheating of life 
 for the benefit of art. But for me this does not come into con- 
 sideration either. Since in the last analysis my productivity springs 
 from the most direct admiration of life, from the daily inexhaust- 
 ible marveling at it (how else would I have come to produce?), so 
 I would see a lie in that too, in rejecting at any time the streaming 
 of it towards me; every such renunciation, however much one's 
 art may potentially gain from it, must finally come to expression 
 in that art as hardness, and have its revenge: for who would be 
 entirely open and acquiescent in such a sensitive domain, if he 
 had a mistrustful, constraining and timid attitude toward life! 
 So one learns, alas how slowly; life works its way over a lot of 
 "first principles" to 'what purpose do we master it a little in the 
 end? 
 
 Rodin often reflected upon this in his old age. Sometimes, at 
 five in the morning, I would find him standing in the garden, sunk 
 in contemplation of the cliffs of Sevres and St. Cloud that slowly 
 rose out of the wonderful autumn mist of the Seine as though they 
 were now coming, perfectly correctly formed, into being , there 
 he would stand, the old man, and consider: "To 'what purpose 
 have I mastered it now, this marveling, the knowing how much 
 a morning like this is . . . ?" And a year later he understood not 
 even this, 'was not master of it after all, had not been master of it 
 after all, for an influence, a destiny, far below his level, had 
 shrouded him and surrounded him with the most dismal con- 
 fusions, out of which no glory declared itself! 
 
 Dear Countess, I only wanted to give you the reasons for my 
 silence where have I got to? . . . 
 
 To Countess 
 
 Maria Viktoria Attems Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 March 12, 1921 
 
 ... In view of the kind interest I discern in your note, it al- 
 most comes hard for me to admit the attitude or prejudice which, 
 to be honest, I must nevertheless confess to in face of your in- 
 quiry. 
 
 I do not know to 'which of my works your artistic ideas have 
 reference, but fundamentally it holds for all that I am, alas! 
 quite sincerely averse to any accompaniment musical as well as 
 illustrative to my works. It is after all my aim to fill with my 
 own creative output the whole artistic space that offers itself 
 to an idea in my mind. I hate to believe (assuming my creation to 
 be successful in a highest sense) that there can be any room left 
 over for another art, which would itself then be interpretative 
 and complementary. I find illustration quite particularly annoying 
 because it dictates certain definite restrictions to the free play 
 of the imagination (of the reader) : that the reader should, how- 
 ever, keep his whole special freedom in his reception of an artis- 
 tically really well-developed work (one might of course ap- 
 prove of illustration for some slighter, purely entertaining cate- 
 gory) this seems to me to be of the essence of that work's effect. 
 So that I cannot imagine the individual arts being nearly separated 
 enough; which exaggerated attitude, as I hasten to admit, perhaps 
 has its most sensitive reason in the fact that I myself, with a strong 
 leaning toward expression in painting, had in my youth to decide 
 for one art to escape distraction and so this decision happened 
 with a certain impassioned exclusivity. Moreover, in my ex- 
 perience every artist while he is producing must, for the sake of 
 intensity, regard his means of expression as, so to speak, the only 
 ones; for otherwise he might easily come to the conclusion that 
 this or that bit of world was not expressible at all by his means, 
 and would finally fall into the innermost space between the in- 
 dividual arts, which goodness knows gapes wide enough and 
 which only the vital tensity of the great masters of the Rennais- 
 sance was really able to bridge over. We are faced with the task of 
 each clearly deciding for one, his own, form of expression; and to 
 this creative activity, enclosed in one province, all coming-to-the- 
 rescue on the part of other arts becomes weakening and dan- 
 gerous. . . . 
 
 T0 Erwein Baron von Aretin Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 last day of March, 1921 
 
 Let me, since memory allows me, dwell a while in thought 
 of your father. ... I can imagine, dear friend, that to the old 
 gentleman the end will not be too hard easier than to you the 
 thought of losing him, even though you have seen him suffer so 
 long . For that generation, strong and active in such vastly 
 different hopes and expectations, the turning away from things 
 as they are today is something final , it is almost that for us too, 
 since even that least ability still to understand is missing, by which 
 one practiced principally in looking into his inner world might 
 still remain connected with something more universal. Do not 
 for that reason, therefore, regret the uneventful rural remoteness 
 of your existence, it offers, perhaps, just as it is, the most favor- 
 able conditions for a silent and, in its way, steady connection; be 
 it ever so inactive and without marked ups and downs, it is still 
 confirmed, believed me, by deepest Nature. Productivity in- 
 deed, even the most fertile, only serves to create a certain inner 
 constant, and perhaps art amounts to so much only because cer- 
 tain of its purest creations give a guarantee for the achievement 
 of a more reliable inner attitude (et encore!). Particularly in 
 our time, when the majority are driven to artistic (or pseudo- 
 artistic) activity by ambition, one cannot insist nearly enough 
 upon this last, this only fundamental in the evalution of art, 
 which is so deep and hidden that the most inconspicuous service 
 in its behalf should all the more be regarded as equal to that most 
 conspicuous and illustrious service (i. e., of real production) . 
 
 Indeed, "my" Paris is not the political one! Those characteris- 
 tics through which, in the days of my most intense learning, it 
 became in an unsurpassed sense a world to me, probably never 
 had much influence on the behavior of its politicians, but neither, 
 fortunately, could they be destroyed by the mistakes of those 
 politicians. Furthermore, what now appears as the extremest 
 blindest chauvinism and has indeed the effect of such, still does 
 not altogether correspond to that "pan-Germanest Berlin" and the 
 dread that it arouses. The Frenchman has too long been accus- 
 tomed to consider himself incomparable suddenly to compare 
 himself; his overestimation has so infinitely much memory and 
 tradition that it becomes perfectly delighted with itself, while 
 his every presumption (just like Keyserling's so often) becomes 
 charming and innocent. Certain temperaments, too, are so apt to 
 see the foreign in the light of something inimical and bad some- 
 thing irreconcilably "different"; and what, for the Frenchman, 
 has not been simply "different" through all time! I am always 
 reminded how utterly impossible it was to impress on Rodin a 
 foreign, Austrian or Scandinavian name; one might pronounce 
 it for him as often and as accurately as one could , he heard it 
 differently, and like the French ear the Frenchman's other senses 
 are altogether unalterable. How many frightful mistakes may have 
 their reason in this limitation. Also the new insight into the real 
 German life could have been successful only in a single very 
 transient moment in recent years; as it did not happen then, the 
 mistakes of the observer on the other side were bound immediately 
 to grow bigger and grosser again, for already the possibility of 
 discerning what the German entity wants to become was dimin- 
 ished one will obscured the other , and the Frenchman, as a 
 beginner in looking out and beyond, promptly failed to follow 
 and withdrew into the security of his prejudices which to him 
 were incomparably more palpable and dependable. Even we have 
 no vision capable of grasping and reconciling that whole mixed 
 rather than chemically combined as which a nation appears that 
 is at once so shaken and so unawake : the bearer of this vision 
 would have to be that very statesman whose absence, in face of the 
 need that is demanding him, is almost incomprehensible! 
 
 But where have I got to, on the sixth page of this letter, merely 
 making my Paris, that I once left and now know to be unharmed 
 in its glory, a little more conjecturable to you. It happens to be 
 the only place in the world where, out of temperament and un- 
 supervised impulses, such a cross-section of all the directions and 
 tensions of human life could develop, one of those hidden foci 
 of that ellipse "life" whose other focus is probably but a mirror- 
 image of a place fixed far above us. 
 
 Dear friend, I will nevertheless go the ten kilometers over 
 to Neuburg and back, at long intervals, to tell you still further 
 about all this: for now I know my whole self again, and no part 
 of it more than that scared momentary cutout with highly uncer- 
 tain edges, to which I was confined during the war. , . . 
 
 To Erivein Baron von Aretin Schloss Berg am Irchel, 
 
 Canton Zurich, Switzerland 
 May i, 1921 
 
 ... I am sure you are fully resigned in feeling and under the 
 influence of the pure serene order that indeed cannot but be mute 
 and indifferent toward our limitation. 
 
 Your mother will find in her faith that deepest consolation 
 that has its source in the very center of sorrow; I only hope you 
 may all feel able to make her having to stay behind gentle and 
 reconcilable. 
 
 For the rest it is our grief's strange prerogative that there, where 
 it does not appear confused by the contradiction that in in- 
 dividual cases we think a life seems incomplete, interrupted, 
 broken off , it is allowed to be all learning, all work, purest, most 
 perfect awareness. And nowhere does it more largely manifest it- 
 self in this singular challenge to us than in the loss of our father in 
 his old age: which, in a way, obligates us to collect ourselves 
 anew, indeed to a first self-reliance of our inner capacities. 
 
 So long as our father is living, we are naturally as though 
 modeled in relief upon him (hence too the tragedy of the con- 
 flicts) ; this blow it is that first makes us into the full round, free, 
 alas, standing free on all sides . . . (our mother, of course, 
 courageous creature, from the beginning set us as far out as pos- 
 sible ). . . . 
 
 
 Am 21. Juni 2021 war er schon in Le Prieure d'Etoy, Canton de Vaud