Childhood
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely —and why?
We're still reminded—: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on
as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.
And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.
Notes
Childhood often returns to us as a collection of places rather than events. A classroom, a garden, the strange loneliness of an afternoon that seemed to last forever. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s Childhood, the world of early life appears both intimate and distant, filled with sensations that remain vivid even as the person who experienced them becomes increasingly difficult to recognize. Memory gives us the illusion of continuity, yet the child we remember is already someone we can only encounter through fragments. We inherit our past without ever being able to inhabit it again. For November’s The Mask, Rilke brings us to the earliest beginnings of identity, before the many roles of adulthood settle upon us. We spend years learning how to become recognizable to others, while the child we once were gradually becomes a stranger. Perhaps growing older means carrying that stranger within us, even when we can no longer remember their face. #RainerMariaRilke #GermanPoetry #ModernistPoetry #Existentialism #ChildhoodMemories