Subject: Rilke on fame
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Fri Aug 03 2001 - 12:57:30 GMT
This from our friend Rainer may throw light on Salingers outlook on fame.
For I still didn't understand fame, that public demolition of someone who
is in the process of becoming, whose building-site the mob breaks into,
knocking down his stones.
Young man anywhere, in whom something is welling up that makes you shiver,
be grateful that no one knows you. And if those who think you are worthless
contradict you, and if those who you call your friends abandon you, and if
they want to destroy you because of your precious ideas: what is this
obvious danger, which concentrates you inside yourself, compared to the
cunning enmity of fame, later, which makes you innocuous by scattering you
all around?
Don't ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time
passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don't take
this more seriously than anything else you might find in their mouths.
Think rather that it has become cheapened, and throw it away. Take another
name, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from
everyone.
Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have
caught up with you because of your fame. A little while ago, they were
against you body and soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they
pull your words around with them in the cages of their presumption, and
exhibit them in the streets, and tease them a little, from a safe distance.
All your terrifying wild beasts.
Rainer Maria Rilke --The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge -- pages 80-81RH edition
Paul
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