Stories of God

This book by Rainer M. Rilke is a collection of thirteen inter-related short stories, framed through the device of an unnamed narrator telling these stories to various elderly or disabled friends. It was written in 1899 after Rilke visited rural Russia where he met many spiritually inspiring peasants - the text has probably been translated into English a few times, but I used the Shambhala 2003 version.

   Anyway. Whatever God these are stories of, it is not the Abrahamic one. Rilke's God is vaguely easy to like as a character but very hard to imagine one seriously worshipping as a deity. 'God' comes across as benevolent, yes - but also impotent, neurotic, infantile at times; the stories may have poignant poetic overtones but they are rather devoid of any meaningful insight into God's character as understood by orthodox tradition, or even mystics - it reads like the excited scribblings of someone who has found themselves suddenly entranced by mysticism & wants to dabble in it despite having minimal understanding of spiritual or theological frameworks underlying all said authentic mysticisms. Which, knowing Rilke's biography, is probably a fairly astute judgement.

   The human characters in these stories too are quite boringly sketched; they seem to have one personality between them and that largely a mere mechanism for delivering authorial ponderings (except in the last chapter, where they behave more like actual characters) . This collection of stories may be titillating to the heart & provocative to the mind but they have virtually nothing to offer the soul. Which I for one found disappointing for a book of such a title. Sharpish prose & dullish ideas; interesting & entertaining, but not particularly helpful for any real, deep explorations in faith. A few of them are fairly edifying, but chapter eleven, about the artists' association, is in my opinion the closest any of them come to making an original potent point.

   I would maybe recommend this if you'd be interested in well-written curious little folk fairy-tales with 'God' as the core character - but if you're looking for profound, challenging, spiritually-insightful fiction, this probably isn't it.

Rainer Maria Rilke: selected poems

This book is the Everyman Pocket Library Poets collection of poems by the early-20th-century lovely lonely genius, Rainer M. Rilke (yes, the very same). Translated beautifully from their original German by Stephen Spender & J. B. Leishman, here are collected work from several of Rilke's own volumes and publications; six from The Book of Images, twelve from New Poems, his Requiem for a Friend, a small curation from between 1908 to 1926, a handful plus cut-outs from his longer pieces in the French poems, the whole series titled The Life of Mary, the whole Duino Elegies sequence, and a good 33 or so from his run of Sonnets to Orpheus.
   Any efforts by myself to try to cram a disrespectfully brief outlining theme, content, etc with regard to all these is already redundant; even translated (which I must again mention as the retention of complex & subtle rhyming schemes can't be an easy thing to do) some of these have gotta be among the most emotional, colourful, nature-bound, reverent, thematically ambivalent and humanly spiritually comforting that I've read in recent times and it's made me want to devour his whole oeuvre.

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.