ABSTRACT
The German poet Rilke wrote about the hard to grasp parts of life, what he termed the Too Big, especially how to live in a world marked by death. He tried to bring such knowings to words in a way that created a widened space that was about the oneness of life and death. What Rilke called the "work of the heart" posits angels as about living without certain belief and truth. In essence, Rilke's "assenting Angels" are about the paradox of affirming from negation, about overcoming the lack of hope that comes when life is "teaching its most desperate lessons." For Rilke, the test of living was an alchemy that used pain and suffering in order to earn hope in a hard world. His are terrible angels, annihilators of images we have built up "fondly and lazily," in our delusions of some higher order. Shatterers, great undeceivers, this is "the angelic terror" where we have to learn to live without redemption, no longer sheltered by the ruins of Christianity. Here the angels are about saying yes to life in the face of disaster, sickness, murder, cruelty and senseless death.
