You Must Change Your Life Read online

  Within the year, René’s Uncle Jaroslav took pity on the boy and offered to pay for a private tutor in Prague so he could finish his studies at home. A prosperous lawyer, René’s uncle was now known as Jaroslav von Rilke, having achieved the noble title that so painfully eluded his brother. Jaroslav had no trouble covering the expense and, with no surviving sons of his own, saw René as a potential protégé to one day take over his law firm and legacy.

  Jaroslav instituted a stipend to support René during the remainder of his high school education and through university. Of course, the aspiring poet had no intention of going to law school. He had made up his mind to become a writer—a detail he was able to spare his uncle, for Jaroslav died of a stroke that winter.

  Although Rilke did not carry out his uncle’s wishes, he did not squander the man’s generosity. The year following his graduation he wrote dozens of short stories, plays, news articles and launched his own literary journal. He joined a writers’ group and even made a few friends. In 1894, Rilke published his first book, a volume of gushing love poems titled Life and Songs that was inspired by his first serious girlfriend, “a bright shooting-star” called Valerie. The sentimental verses were sodden with the dewy flowers and singing maidens of German Romanticism, and the book did not reward him with the immediate glory he thought he deserved.

  When Rilke’s psychodramatic playwriting fared no better, he did not consider the possibility that his work was amateur. Instead, he blamed readers for failing to understand it. Prague was a town of the bygone, filled with graveyards, castles and parochial dilettantes, he concluded. The people there were so stuck in the past they even looked old. “The only progress they know is when their coffins rot to pieces or their garments fall apart,” he wrote. While Rilke admired many Slavic traditions, including their folk history and reverence for the land, the people were too poor to concern themselves with literary pursuits. The Austrians were worse because they could afford to embrace the arts, but cared only about status and money.

  When Rilke turned twenty, he realized that if his poetry didn’t take off soon his parents would have their doubts validated. He would be forced to take a job at a bank or law firm in Prague and stay there, maybe forever. The city was not an environment hospitable to creativity, with its air that could hardly “be breathed, thick with stale summer and unconquered childhood,” he wrote.

  Rilke had met young people who moved to cities known for nurturing artists. Many had gone to Paris, but Rilke believed the French exerted too much influence over the artistic production of Eastern Europe. He saw a better option in Munich, then the intellectual nerve center of Europe, where the most coveted social seat in town was at the lecture hall. At the cafés, secular youth debated Nietzsche’s declaration of “the death of God,” while the artists revolted against the academy, resulting in the Munich Secession of 1892—five years before Gustav Klimt led the movement in Vienna.

  Rilke could continue living on his uncle’s stipend there as long as he was in school. So, in the fall of 1896, he enrolled in classes at the University of Munich with the intention of rejecting everything that had defined him thus far. His mother’s zealous Catholicism, his father’s military aspirations, Prague’s provincialism—even his own name—he was prepared to leave it all behind.

  AN INTELLECTUAL TREND in German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century was the study of individuals and how they functioned within societies. Philosophers and neurologists were combining expertise to create new sciences of the mind. Phenomenology was founded to study the nature of consciousness; psychoanalysis for the unconscious. Art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence within these disciplines. Psychologists began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been tested in laboratories.

  The German doctor Wilhelm Wundt accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s, while he was conducting some routine research on reaction times. He had rigged the pendulum of a clock into a timer he called a “thought meter,” when it occurred to him that perhaps his experiment measured not only a neurological phenomenon, but an unconscious one. Reaction times seemed to bridge the gap between voluntary and involuntary attention, between the brain and the mind. If science could measure the former, he couldn’t see why it wouldn’t also apply to the latter. In 1879, Wundt founded the world’s first laboratory for psychological experimentation in Leipzig.

  It took a philosopher from the next generation, Theodor Lipps, to draw the link between Wundt’s new discipline and his own, aesthetics. Lipps had been a forerunner in the creation of phenomenology, but started to break away from the field and its figurehead, Edmund Husserl, in order to pursue a psychological approach to his central question: Why does art give us pleasure?

  At the time, scientists largely reduced art appreciation to mathematical properties. They believed that certain unities of geometry were simply more agreeable to the mind’s eye than others. But Lipps refused to settle for this rigid, retinal explanation. He thought it could help explain perception, but that it had little to do with pleasure, which he suspected involved more subjective forces, like an individual’s mood or educational background.

  Perhaps the equation could be reversed, he decided. Rather than art grafting pleasure onto the eye, maybe the eye made the art. After all, the distribution of paint on canvas could not be considered beautiful without a beholder to see it as such. (A contemporary of Lipps’s in Vienna, the art historian Alois Riegl, later called this the “beholder’s involvement.”) In this view, colors are simply pigments until a mind filters them into what one might call tones, or hue-based triggers of memory and emotion. The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist.

  Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.” For Vischer, einfühlung revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter.

  Empathy explained why people sometimes describe the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful work of art. Maybe their ears deafen to the sounds around them, the hair rises on the backs of their necks or they lose track of the passage of time. Something produces a “gut feeling” or triggers a flood of memory, like Proust’s madeleine. When a work of art is effective, it draws the observer out into the world, while the observer draws the work back into his or her body. Empathy was what made red paint run like blood in the veins, or a blue sky fill the lungs with air.

  Paradoxically, then, empathy is by definition a selfish emotion: we empathize with the external in order to enjoy ourselves. Empathy is life-affirming, it allows us to permeate the world. On the other hand, when art fails to activate this response, people may say that it doesn’t “move” them. That it is “impenetrable” or they cannot wrap their “head around it.” In these instances, perception is the only sense at work.

  Intellectuals across Europe quickly took note of Lipps’s research on einfühlung and began to build upon it. Art historians had been attempting to explain why certain cultures created certain art, what Riegl called Kunstwollen, or the “will to art.” In 1906, one of Lipps’s students, Wilhelm Worringer, proposed a seminal theory that coupled his professor’s writing on empathy with tha
t of another professor, the Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel. Adopting Simmel’s use of binaries—a relativist view that held that to understand one concept, such as symmetry, one should also consider its opposite, asymmetry—Worringer described the binary that he believed defined all of art history, and titled his book after it, Abstraction and Empathy.

  But it was psychologists who transformed the obscure term from German art history into the cornerstone of human emotion that we understand as empathy today. In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He went on to advance Lipps’s research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” he said.

  Little known outside of specialist circles today, Lipps was a kind of intellectual celebrity and a highly sought-after speaker. On Friday nights he hosted a lively psychology club, where participants debated the distinction between actions and nonactions, and logicians pitted themselves against psychologists. For a time Lipps also edited an art journal that had the ambitious aim of chronicling the history of art, not dating back to the earliest paintings, but to the origins of creativity itself. When he was appointed chair of the University of Munich’s philosophy department in 1894, thinkers and artists from around the Continent signed up for his classes. The Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi was a student, as was Wassily Kandinsky, from Russia. Lipps’s foundational aesthetics course was also one of the first Rilke enrolled in upon his arrival from Prague.

  BY RILKE’S OWN ADMISSION, he still felt like a child when he arrived in Munich. He moved to Schwabing, a district in the center of town known for a high concentration of students and artists. Apart from Lipps’s class, he signed up for courses on Darwin and Renaissance art, taking an especially keen interest in the paintings of Sandro Botticelli, whose sad, pleading-eyed Madonnas seemed to “stand at the heart of the longing of our time.”

  Soon enough, Rilke found himself moving within social circles alongside Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, and Jakob Wassermann, the German novelist. Wassermann introduced Rilke to the work of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose book about a young “dreamer, floundering around in a slough of doubt and self-analysis,” Niels Lyhne, would become an essential source of comfort to Rilke for years to come. But even this would not compare with the gift Wassermann gave him when, in 1897, he introduced the poet to Lou Andreas-Salomé. For a woman of any era, Andreas-Salomé’s intellectual influence was extraordinary. For a radical Russian feminist in the nineteenth century, it was almost inconceivable.

  Louise von Salomé, as she was named at birth, was an accomplished philosopher and writer, but today she is better remembered as a muse. She had rejected two marriage proposals from Friedrich Nietzsche, who once called her “by far the smartest person I ever knew,” and another from Nietzsche’s friend the philosopher Paul Rée. Although she didn’t want to marry either man, she was fascinated by their minds and suggested they all live together in an intellectual “holy trinity.” Astonishingly, they agreed.

  Lou Andreas-Salomé with Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée, 1882.

  A photo taken in 1882 to celebrate their “Pythagorean friendship,” as Nietzsche called it, shows the two men hauling Salomé, then twenty-one, in a wooden cart while she brandishes a whip. The trio’s amusement didn’t last long, however, before jealousy set in and destroyed the union before it had a chance to materialize. Salomé decided that she wanted to spend the winter in Berlin with Rée alone. He was only too happy to comply, writing, “I really ought to be thinking about ‘the origin of conscience in the individual,’ but, dammit, I am always thinking about Lou.”

  Nietzsche, feeling betrayed and abandoned, met Rée and Salomé at a train station in Germany only to storm off and never see them again. He wrote a letter soon after to inform them that their cruelty had compelled him to take an “enormous quantity” of opium. But instead of committing suicide, Nietzsche actually retreated to northern Italy, where in ten days he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which includes the famous line thought to refer to Salomé, “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”

  Four years later, Salomé married the forty-one-year-old philologist Carl Andreas. (He, too, reportedly threatened to kill himself, if she rejected him.) Her consent came with two considerable caveats, however: no sex and no children. She was to remain free to continue her affair with Rée or anyone else she might fancy, and Andreas could also take lovers. She even offered to help introduce him to prospective paramours. The arrangement did not always go smoothly—Andreas fathered a child with their housekeeper, who lived with the couple for the rest of her life—but they never parted.

  Andreas-Salomé’s main gift was her acutely analytical mind. She had an uncanny ability to comprehend abstruse ideas from the era’s most formidable thinkers, often illuminating aspects of their own arguments that they had not even conceived. She was a kind of intellectual therapist: listening, describing, analyzing and repeating back their ideas in order to illuminate the places where shadows fell in their logic.

  Rilke added himself to Andreas-Salomé’s long list of admirers almost from the moment he learned of her existence. He had just written his “Visions of Christ” cycle, a Nietzsche-inspired challenge to Christian dogma, when an editor friend suggested he read her essay on similar themes, “Jesus the Jew.”

  As he pored over her words, an intimate literary kinship formed in Rilke’s mind overnight. Soon he began mailing her unsigned poems. She did not learn who this anonymous correspondent was until the spring of 1897, when she paid a visit to Munich. When Rilke heard she was coming to town he convinced Wassermann, a mutual friend, to stage an introduction over tea.

  Andreas-Salomé, fourteen years Rilke’s senior, arrived to Wassermann’s apartment in a dress of loose, cottony layers that softened her muscular contours. She had a wide, Russian face and tied her ashy hair in a tousled knot atop her head. Rilke quickly saw that she was a mesmerizing storyteller. She commanded the room’s attention with her direct, matter-of-fact descriptions of people and places, yet, strangely, she told narratives out of order, without regard to temporality or linearity at all. Rilke gazed at her “gentle dreamy lost smile,” while she remarked later in her journal upon his soulful eyes. Less kindly, she also wrote that he had “no back to his head.”

  Rilke was so instantly enraptured with Andreas-Salomé that he wrote to his mother that night to tell her about meeting “the famous writer.” The next morning he wrote another letter, this time to Andreas-Salomé, confessing that the late nights he had spent reading her work had aroused in him a sense of intimacy: “Yesterday was not the first twilight hour I have spent with you,” he told her, adding that he hoped he might one day read her some of his own verses. “I can think of no deeper joy.”

  Andreas-Salomé was more compelled by Rilke’s “human qualities” than by his poetry at first. She could not remember the verses he had enclosed in those early, unsigned letters, but she reread one of her responses to them now and it led her to believe that she “must not have liked them very much.” She did, however, like Rilke’s “manly grace” and his “style of gentle but inviolable control and dominance.” She thought his physical appearance was in perfect accord with his personality. Two weeks after their first meeting they took a weekend trip to a Bavarian lake, where they immediately became lovers.

  They spent the next several months together, with Rilke reading to her by day, and Andreas-Salomé cooking borscht for him in the evening. He soon adopted h
er bohemian habits of walking barefoot and eating a vegetarian diet. And he now shunned stiff professional attire in favor of tunics and loose peasant garb.

  Rilke felt for Andreas-Salomé the kind of reckless passion he would later ascribe to young people who “fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion.” Andreas-Salomé did not return Rilke’s unhinged adoration, but she began to genuinely appreciate his talent and believed that the qualities she disliked in him could be fixed with a little grooming. She began to mold the poet into a version of himself that she found more attractive. She advised him to copy her courtly style of handwriting and to cultivate his masculinity. The name René was too French and feminine, she said, and suggested he change it to the sturdier, Germanic-sounding Rainer.

  The poet hungered to become her creation. More than his first great lover, Andreas-Salomé was his confidante, his mentor, his muse, even a kind of mother—if not to the young man, then at least to the artist maturing inside him. “I am still soft, I can be like wax in your hands. Take me, give me a form, finish me,” he wrote in an autobiographical story when he met her. Rilke welcomed her rechristening him with this enigmatic new name, which would take on an almost mythical identity of its own. To the author Stefan Zweig, the letters looked as if they ought to be hammered into fine threads of gold. “Rainer Maria Rilke,” wrote another friend, “your very name is a poem.”

  Within the year, Rilke dropped out of the university in Munich to follow Andreas-Salomé to Berlin. Her native Russia was becoming a kind of mythopoetic symbol of the Slavic identity Rilke felt he had been denied growing up under the Austrian Empire. She had been teaching him the language, and he now hoped to learn it well enough to translate Russian literature.