The first offering. Yesterday, one of my teachers passed this poem on to me; he said he stumbled upon it by 'accident.' A beautiful accident for us given our experiment of reading Rilke together this summer.
The Reader
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Who knows him, this one, whose own face
sinks away out of its being into a second one,
that only the quick turning of whole pages
sometimes forcibly interrupts?
Even his own mother would be uncertain
if that were him, who, together with his shadow,
was drenched with reading. And we, hours to spare,
what do we know, how much he fades away, until,
in fatigue, he stops: raising up everything
into himself which has happened in the book below,
with eyes, which, instead of taking, nudge up
against the full and finished world as they give:
like quiet children, who, playing alone,
suddenly experience that which is at hand;
and yet his features, ordered as they were,
remain now forever rearranged.
