52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
08. Ahead of all parting: the selected poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke.
I ride the bus with an amateur Rilke scholar, who, when he found out I had a copy of The Book of Hours at home, immediately held an impromptu Rilke seminar right there on the 460 to Pontiac. He recommended this omnibus as the most accessible introduction to Rilke’s work. My overwhelming impression is that the world of entities, objects, rose up and imprinted on Rilke in a blinding flash, a torrent. There’s something commanding, terrible, heightened, in his impressions. And of course a tortured spirituality that’s completely of his time — when men were drunk with the idea that they could strike off on their own again, spiritually, away from the Mother Church. I’m in for a pound, though, with my friend on the bus. I’m going to hunt down Snow’s translation of Duino Elegies.
