“Human lives are led in the weighty and dazzling presence of things”
[…]For all her [Chamberlain] initial misgivings, she has no doubt of the continuing centrality of art and the powers of the imagination to our essential humanness:
[Rilke] was trying to find a new sensibility for the twentieth century, at a time when a certain style of philosophy had not yet made “the meaning of life” a naive question. His poems concern our gender and sexuality, our sense of what we ought to be doing with our lives, the possibility of the existence of God, the charmed kinship with animals which brings us such happiness, the importance of childhood, the attraction of the physical objects we make and buy and choose to live among, the landscapes we respond to, the books we read and the paintings in whose company we live. There is no object under Rilke’s gaze that resists transformation into a feature of a marvellous universe that envelops us in a world that might otherwise leave us restless and afraid. John Banville reviews Rilke: The Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain. The New York Review, November 3, 2022.
