Reflective Writing and Poetic Musing by Condemiang + Stories About the World

Born in Prague, in the Kingdom of Bohemia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was mainly active in Germany and died in Switzerland. His full name was “René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke.” It sounds like one of those absurdly long, tongue-twisting names no one could possibly remember. With a name this long, there can’t possibly be another person on Earth with the same one. When his older sister Maria died at an early age, his mother, yearning for her daughter, shoved ‘Maria’ into Rilke’s name even though he was a boy. He fell head over heels for Lou Salomé, a Russian-born writer and psychoanalyst who was fourteen years older than him, and followed her around like a little duckling. Most likely a case of maternal love deficiency. Even when Lou Salomé entered a marriage that was marriage in name only, he went so far as to visit her home and begged to live with her—a pure-hearted romantic? A stalker? Mentally unstable? It’s said that Salomé was the one who told h...

My Favourite Friends Software Light is both illumination and the very source of distortion and blindness to us. Don’t ask me why—please. Explaining it is so complicated that I’d end up foaming at the mouth and spitting as I talk. But if you really insist, we’d better do it over a drink—at least the spit from an alcohol-disinfected mouth would be somewhat safer. It was through Rainer Maria Rilke that I first discovered metaphor—those quiet bridges between the visible and the invisible. From that moment, I stepped gently but irrevocably into the realms of literature, history, and philosophy. I chose the sciences, yes, and spent the next 38 years shouldering the consequences of that decision. But I never wonder if the other path would have been better. I believe the person I’ve become is the best possible result of the road I walked. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. Most of what I longed for came to me. And the things I didn’t attain? Perhaps they were never what I truly desired in the ...