ABSTRACT
One lives by spending oneself. Spending is the visible, physiological, experiential phenomenon of duration, of oneself, of things. Spending oneself leaves a trace, a resonance (faint or strong). Playing the lute is spending oneself, so is thinking, working, reading, playing, picking flowers, emptying the trash, loving. Had he a lover or a house, Rilke implies (he had many lovers, never a house), he would be distracted from this spending that is his writing. Georg Simmel, philosopher and charismatic professor at the university of Munich during Rilke’s studies there, would have thought of Rilke’s nomadism as the itinerant life of the adventurer, who is not at home on earth but merely a visitor who intuits a secret, timeless existence of a soul connected to him from afar, and for whom his finite existence compared to the transcendent wholeness of his fate is merely an adventure.
