This poem, “The Man Watching” by Rainer Maria Rilke, really struck me this week. I’ve posted the Edward Snow translation below, from the North Point Press edition of The Book of Images:

__________

I can see that the storms are coming/ by the trees, which out of stale lukewarm days/ beat against my anxious windows,/ and I can hear the distances say things/ one can’t bear without a friend,/ can’t love without a sister.

Then the storm swirls, a rearranger,/ swirls through the woods and through time,/ and everything is as if without age:/ the landscape, like verse in the psalter,/ is weight and ardor and eternity.

How small that is, with which we wrestle,/ what wrestles with us, how immense;/ were we to let ourselves, the way things do,/ be conquered thus by the great storm,-/ we would become far-reaching and nameless.

What we triumph over is the Small,/ and the success itself makes of petty./ The Eternal and Unexampled/ will not be bent by us./ This is the Angel, who appeared/ to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:/ when his opponent’s sinews/ in that contest stretch like metal,/ he feels them under his fingers/ like strings making deep melodies.

Whomever this Angel overcame/ (who so often declined the fight),/ he walks erect and justified/ and great out of that hard hand/ which, as if sculpting, nestled round him./ Winning does not tempt him./ His growth is: to be the deeply defeated/ by ever greater things.

________

Not that Rilke had this in mind, per se, but I immediately thought of our different approaches to the world, divided rudely into use and wonder. (I suppose “domination” and “respect” could work too). There’s a way in which scientific pursuits can be fueled either by fear and risk management, or by the intrigue of nature itself.

As I mentioned in an earlier post on C.S. Lewis’ vision of medieval cosmology, there is a way in which we can acknowledge the hugeness and grandiosity of nature without ever inhabiting it, without having the experience of it because of distraction toward smaller things. Part of what we’re concerned with here is a personal and communal discipline, if you will, of being blown away by reality – “to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things.”

Tags: book of images, Rilke, the man watching, wonder

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