Literary Hub Watches When Rilke Met Rodin

At Literary Hub, Rachel Corbett imagines the moment when Rainer Maria Rilke stepped off a train in Paris, walked the city's streets for the first time, and ventured to Auguste Rodin's studio. The passage is an excerpt from Corbett's new book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. More:

Rilke arrived at Paris’s Gare du Nord railway station on a steamy August afternoon. Travelers were advised to immediately entrust their belongings to a porter to avoid thieves and pickpockets who preyed upon tourists bewildered by the crowds at the enormous glass station.

As he stepped out into the street, his shirt buttoned to the top and trousers creased, Rilke’s eyes bulged at the sight of this alien city. He had never seen an industrialized metropolis like this before—the motors, the speeds, the shapeless enormity of the crowds. Machine-powered labor had replaced human jobs and pushed many of the disenfranchised workers into the streets. He spotted disease-ravaged bodies split open with abscesses, trees scorched bare by the sun, beggars with eyes “drying up like puddles.” There were hospitals everywhere.

The crowds of people reminded him of beetles, crawling through garbage, scurrying to survive beneath the giant footsteps of life. Before the advent of big cities and public transportation, one rarely had to look at other people. Here they were everywhere, forming masses that seemed to contain no individual faces, only needs.

The visual field corresponded with the economic spectrum, so that in a single pan of the eye one saw the full gamut of the city’s wealth and poverty. At the bottom were the ragpickers fashioning shantytowns out of the waste of the bourgeoisie, whose carriage horses trotted overhead, leaving trails of litter and horse manure behind them. Somewhere in the middle were the dogs, often quicker than the beggars at snatching up scraps of food.

Continue reading at Literary Hub. Oh hey, remember we have an excerpt from You Must Change Your Life in this month's issue of our own Poetry magazine! It's right here.