13

In his letter to Magda von Hattingberg, in 1924, Rilke reports that his attending to the many flowers he had received in his tower in Muzot had become a veritable drudgery:

How rarely I venture out to pick flowers, for even to love them has become a labor; their relaxed, distracted, and dreamy wellbeing stands in no relation to my strenuous efforts to cut and arrange them; they make incredible demands.

(Mitten 26) The letter goes on to describe Rilke’s night-long toiling by candle-light to arrange blooming branches given to him by acquaintances, and his futile efforts to find vases for flowers in the dark of his rooms:

Oh, they looked tired as fainting,—surely they must have been carried in hands all day long, their stems limp with human warmth, my conscience stirred, I felt one should do much for them.

(Mitten 26)