My strength often fails, but Rodin lifts everything and lifts it out beyond himself and sets it down in space

In 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph about the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke travelled to Paris, where he met Rodin in person. The two immediately got along, both personally and artistically (Rilke being 26 years old at the time and Rodin 61). Three years later, after reading a French translation of Rilke’s monograph (published in 1903), Rodin asked Rilke to come work for him as his personal secretary. Rilke accepted the offer and was Rodin's assistant from September 1905 until the spring of 1906, living near Rodin’s home in Meudon in a cottage owned by the sculptor. The working relationship between the two eventually came to an end due to a disagreement. Nevertheless, Rodin left an indelible impression on Rilke, greatly influencing the poet's work. (Rodin's influence appears indirectly in Rilke's most famous and widely read work, Letters to a Young Poet (1929).)

Rodin taught Rilke the importance of attentive observation, i.e. perceiving things not as mere objects but as expressions of inner life and form. In a letter to the Hungarian writer Arthur Holitscher, written a few months after he began working for Rodin, Rilke reflects on the lessons he was learning: how to work and live with patience, how to find joy even in the smallest objects, and how only through difficulty —by going "all the way to the bottom"— can one reach true depth.

Villa des Brillants, Meudon-Val-Fleury

December 13, 1905 

... Where did you last leave me? Now you find me again in a little cottage that belongs to Rodin and stands in his garden on the slopes of Meudon, facing the skies, before which, far, far off, Saint-Cloud rises, with the window always on that part of the Seine which through the Pont de Sevres has become a stanza.

And there my life is. A little as Rodin’s secretary, writing very reprehensible French letters, but above all among his grown-up things and in his great serene friendship learning, slowly learning this: to live, to have patience, to work, and never to miss an inducement to joy. For this wise and great man knows how to find joy, friend; a joy as nameless as that one remembers from childhood, and yet full to the brim with the deepest inducement; the smallest things come to him and open up to him; a chestnut that we find, a stone, a shell in the gravel, everything speaks as though it had been in the wilderness and had meditated and fasted. And we have almost nothing to do but listen; for work itself comes, out of this listening; one must lift it out with both arms, for it is heavy. My strength often fails, but Rodin lifts everything and lifts it out beyond himself and sets it down in space. And that is a nameless example. I believe in age, dear friend. To work and to grow old, this it is that life expects of us. And then someday to be old and still not by any means to understand everything, no, but to begin, but to love, but to sense, but to link up with what is distant and inexpressible, even into the stars. I say to myself: how good, how precious life must be, when I hear this old man so grand in his speaking of it, so torrential in his silence.

Often indeed we do not know this, we who are in the difficult, up over our knees, up to our chests, up to our chins. But are we then happy in the easy, aren’t we almost embarrassed in the easy? Our hearts lie deep, but if we are not pressed down into them, we never go all the way to the bottom. And yet it is necessary to have been to the bottom. That is the point.

Bon courage, Rodin says to me sometimes, for no apparent reason, when we part in the evening, even when we have been talking of very good things; he knows how necessary that is, every day, when one is young.

Note:

Rodin was best known for his sculptures The Thinker (Le Penseur; 1904), The Kiss (Le Baiser; 1882) and The Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais; 1884-1889). Both The Thinker and The Kiss were originally conceived as figures for Rodin’s monumental The Gates of Hell (La Porte de l'Enfer), a project he began around 1880 and continuously altered until his death in 1917.

Source letter:  Letters Of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892-1910 (1945), by Mary D. Herter Norton

Via: Internet Archive

Image of Rilke (l) and Rodin via The American Reader; and (right picture) Rodin by George Charles Beresford, dated 1902, via Wikimedia Commons.