ABSTRACT
For Rilke, the face is the exemplary object of inexhaustible perception and of such delicacy. While the other’s face is recognizable, its abundance of signifiers confounds the efforts fully to know it—the face as metaphor for the poem, the poem as metaphor for the face. But what people know from a human face is, of course, less decipherable than the face of a clock that tells them that it is half past four. The soul is the symbol for the mysterious, unknowable inwardness of the face—the face burdened by time. That poetry does not amount merely to some sentimental poetical musing is dramatized in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, where faces are exchangeable and worn like gloves condemning their owners to disappear behind them. When the protagonist spies a poor woman squatting at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-de-Champs and “leise” slows his pace, the face’s anonymity, otherwise comfortably worn by all, is briefly and literally on display.
