ABSTRACT
Was there not, once, a hand that held all falling infinitely gently? Do not the flowers gently handled by the girls recover once more from their death already begun? Though at the end of his life he may himself no longer have been able to conceive of or to provide the consolation of the large invisible hand, and though everything lifts us away, we open Rilke’s books again in the empty house. Each book sounds like water falling in the fountain. Each poem stands still like the water in the pitcher holding the flowers.
