ABSTRACT
How one should love things is pondered again in the ninth of the Duino Elegies where Rilke provides yet another list of things, this time not as heterodox as before. Seven years earlier, in “The Spanish Trilogy,” Rilke utters with a passion bordering on prayer the desire to save, to hold back, to preserve what is inexorably fated to vanish. For, to paraphrase Rilke, people are to show the angel not some world of abstract ideas or trifling human emotions, but they are to show the angel what happens to things when they speak (of) them. The angel’s abode is eternity. It does not know departure, vanishing, mortality — the daily waste and passing of things. It stands astonished in the face of time, more astonished yet by the daring of words that speak of things — when but to speak is to be full of sorrow — as if words could save them.
