ABSTRACT
Rilke sometimes describes the temporality of a thing as a spectrum of colors, as in his letter to Countess Maria Gneisenau on 11 September 1906 about the brief, beautiful equilibrium of a rose. The adjectival qualifications by which wilting acquires its “slowly descending tones” and its “tender, slightly plaintiff nuances” not only exemplify Rilke’s gentle powers of attentiveness but also his aesthetic of fading and dying. The poet’s task, as he explains to Aline Dietrichstein on 6 and 7 August 1919, is to “prepare the hearts [of his readers] for those gentle, secretive, trembling transformations which alone bring forth understanding and unity of a clarified future”. Everything Rilke says about colors could be said about living and dying. It is an arc, a spectrum, a transition that has no name. It is a slow turning to white. Rilke’s life-long insistence on the continuity and complementarity of life and death applies, however, only to living.
