ABSTRACT

From these considerations of enchantment in its primary colors of reading, listening, and gazing we want to further our story by turning to our second icon, as it were, or lens, through whose work we wish to discern the lineaments of enchantment yet further and embellish our twisted secular metaphysics. In speaking of Rilke, we must speak also of Lou Salomé, his lover and muse. Before she met Rilke, Lou had been an associate of Nietzsche, and after her affair with Rilke, although while they were still in touch by letter, Lou helped Freud at the inception of psychoanalysis. With Rilke, Lou Salomé enters our story too. Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud are names it is customary to associate with a metaphysics of a twisted secular kind, to say the least.