You Must Change Your Life (4 page)

Born into this segregated city, Rilke quickly discovered that gender was not the only boundary that proved contradictory in his early life. He was part of Prague's German-speaking minority, which enjoyed vast cultural and economic advantages over the Czech majority. Liberal families like the Rilkes wanted to live peacefully alongside the Slavs, but they kept to their own schools, theaters and neighborhoods, delineated by street signs written in their own language. Rilke would go on to speak Russian, Danish and French, but he always regretted never learning the language native to his homeland.

When René turned nine, Sophia left Josef. She had become almost fanatically religious and, as Rilke later reasoned, was a woman who “wanted something indefinite of life.” By that time René had grown out of his girlish looks into a slender, narrow-shouldered adolescent and his parents sent him to live at the St. Pölten military academy near Vienna. Rilke was not opposed to following in his father's footsteps, but not because he was interested in combat or physical training. He liked the elegant uniform, the order, and the rituals the military represented.

But Sophia and Josef's hope that their son might achieve what his father had not was promptly dashed. While the move had succeeded in replacing René's dolls with dumbbells, it also thrust him into a roost with fifty brutal boys, with whom he had nothing in common. He quickly discovered that life at the academy had little to do with discipline or elegance.

Young Rilke longed only to join the adult world. He was too intellectual to keep company with the working-class boys and he wasn't refined enough for the aristocratic ones. Solitude might have suited him fine, but he wouldn't be so lucky. To his classmates, René was
fragile, precocious and a moral scold—all qualities that aligned into ideal crosshairs for bullies. In an account of one of the many attacks he suffered as a boy it becomes painfully clear why he was seen as a target:

Once when I was struck so hard in the face that my knees shook, I said to my unjust attacker—I can still hear it—in the calmest of voices “I will suffer it because Christ suffered it, in silence and without complaining, and while you were striking me, I prayed to my dear Lord that he may forgive you.” The miserable coward simply stood there for a moment dumbfounded, then burst into a fit of scornful laughter . . .

The boy went to the chapel to recover from his beating and to nurse his righteous indignation. It was around this time that he developed the chronic, undefined infirmity that would afflict him for the rest of his life. Some thought Rilke's mysterious ailments were entirely imagined and, indeed, when a lung infection took the boy out of school for six weeks, he seemed to learn that sympathy could be a deft social strategy. But others who saw him in these states testified that his trembling muscles and pallid complexion were too convincing to discount.

In any case, the sickroom became Rilke's sanctuary at military school. It provided immediate asylum from his antagonizers and, more importantly, allowed him time and space to read. Lying in bed, he rolled around with sentences day and night. He cried into pages of Goethe. His grades in literature classes started to improve, though they dropped in fencing and gym. Despite his failing physical education, Rilke still thought he could be a military officer, and at one point tried to prove it to his instructors by writing an eighty-page “History of the Thirty-Years War.”

At the suggestion of teachers, the boy began submitting poems to newspapers, and several were accepted. He survived on these small consolations until he turned fifteen, when, finally, his parents saved
him from that “dungeon of childhood,” as he called the academy. But he fared no better at the business school they sent him to next in the Austrian town of Linz. Noticing with “scorn and uneasiness” that his son was still writing poems, Josef tried to convince René to focus more on his studies and write only on the weekends. He saw no reason why his son couldn't maintain both a job and a hobby, which was how he saw poetry. But to René, his poems were his “dream children,” and nothing was more upsetting than the thought of sacrificing them to a dull office job. He had decided that the artist who only wrote on the weekends was “not an artist at all.”

Within the year, René's Uncle Jaroslav took pity on the boy and offered to pay for a private tutor in Prague so he could finish his studies at home. A prosperous lawyer, René's uncle was now known as Jaroslav
von
Rilke, having achieved the noble title that so painfully eluded his brother. Jaroslav had no trouble covering the expense and, with no surviving sons of his own, saw René as a potential protégé to one day take over his law firm and legacy.

Jaroslav instituted a stipend to support René during the remainder of his high school education and through university. Of course, the aspiring poet had no intention of going to law school. He had made up his mind to become a writer—a detail he was able to spare his uncle, for Jaroslav died of a stroke that winter.

Although Rilke did not carry out his uncle's wishes, he did not squander the man's generosity. The year following his graduation he wrote dozens of short stories, plays, news articles and launched his own literary journal. He joined a writers' group and even made a few friends. In 1894, Rilke published his first book, a volume of gushing love poems titled
Life and Songs
that was inspired by his first serious girlfriend, “a bright shooting-star” called Valerie. The sentimental verses were sodden with the dewy flowers and singing maidens of German Romanticism, and the book did not reward him with the immediate glory he thought he deserved.

When Rilke's psychodramatic playwriting fared no better, he did not consider the possibility that his work was amateur. Instead, he
blamed readers for failing to understand it. Prague was a town of the bygone, filled with graveyards, castles and parochial dilettantes, he concluded. The people there were so stuck in the past they even looked old. “The only progress they know is when their coffins rot to pieces or their garments fall apart,” he wrote. While Rilke admired many Slavic traditions, including their folk history and reverence for the land, the people were too poor to concern themselves with literary pursuits. The Austrians were worse because they could afford to embrace the arts, but cared only about status and money.

When Rilke turned twenty, he realized that if his poetry didn't take off soon his parents would have their doubts validated. He would be forced to take a job at a bank or law firm in Prague and stay there, maybe forever. The city was not an environment hospitable to creativity, with its air that could hardly “be breathed, thick with stale summer and unconquered childhood,” he wrote.

Rilke had met young people who moved to cities known for nurturing artists. Many had gone to Paris, but Rilke believed the French exerted too much influence over the artistic production of Eastern Europe. He saw a better option in Munich, then the intellectual nerve center of Europe, where the most coveted social seat in town was at the lecture hall. At the cafés, secular youth debated Nietzsche's declaration of “the death of God,” while the artists revolted against the academy, resulting in the Munich Secession of 1892—five years before Gustav Klimt led the movement in Vienna.

Rilke could continue living on his uncle's stipend there as long as he was in school. So, in the fall of 1896, he enrolled in classes at the University of Munich with the intention of rejecting everything that had defined him thus far. His mother's zealous Catholicism, his father's military aspirations, Prague's provincialism—even his own name—he was prepared to leave it all behind.

AN INTELLECTUAL TREND
in German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century was the study of individuals and how
they functioned within societies. Philosophers and neurologists were combining expertise to create new sciences of the mind. Phenomenology was founded to study the nature of consciousness; psychoanalysis for the unconscious. Art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence within these disciplines. Psychologists began to see how looking at people's emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been tested in laboratories.

The German doctor Wilhelm Wundt accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s, while he was conducting some routine research on reaction times. He had rigged the pendulum of a clock into a timer he called a “thought meter,” when it occurred to him that perhaps his experiment measured not only a neurological phenomenon, but an unconscious one. Reaction times seemed to bridge the gap between voluntary and involuntary attention, between the brain
and
the mind. If science could measure the former, he couldn't see why it wouldn't also apply to the latter. In 1879, Wundt founded the world's first laboratory for psychological experimentation in Leipzig.

It took a philosopher from the next generation, Theodor Lipps, to draw the link between Wundt's new discipline and his own, aesthetics. Lipps had been a forerunner in the creation of phenomenology, but started to break away from the field and its figurehead, Edmund Husserl, in order to pursue a psychological approach to his central question: Why does art give us pleasure?

At the time, scientists largely reduced art appreciation to mathematical properties. They believed that certain unities of geometry were simply more agreeable to the mind's eye than others. But Lipps refused to settle for this rigid, retinal explanation. He thought it could help explain perception, but that it had little to do with pleasure, which he suspected involved more subjective forces, like an individual's mood or educational background.

Perhaps the equation could be reversed, he decided. Rather than art grafting pleasure onto the eye, maybe the eye made the art. After all, the distribution of paint on canvas could not be considered beautiful
without a beholder to see it as such. (A contemporary of Lipps's in Vienna, the art historian Alois Riegl, later called this the “beholder's involvement.”) In this view, colors are simply pigments until a mind filters them into what one might call tones, or hue-based triggers of memory and emotion. The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist.

Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called
einfühlung
, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek
empatheia
, or “in pathos.” For Vischer,
einfühlung
revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter.

Empathy explained why people sometimes describe the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful work of art. Maybe their ears deafen to the sounds around them, the hair rises on the backs of their necks or they lose track of the passage of time. Something produces a “gut feeling” or triggers a flood of memory, like Proust's madeleine. When a work of art is effective, it draws the observer out into the world, while the observer draws the work back into his or her body. Empathy was what made red paint run like blood in the veins, or a blue sky fill the lungs with air.

Paradoxically, then, empathy is by definition a selfish emotion: we empathize with the external in order to enjoy ourselves. Empathy is life-affirming, it allows us to permeate the world. On the other hand, when art fails to activate this response, people may say that it doesn't
“move” them. That it is “impenetrable” or they cannot wrap their “head around it.” In these instances, perception is the only sense at work.

Intellectuals across Europe quickly took note of Lipps's research on
einfühlung
and began to build upon it. Art historians had been attempting to explain why certain cultures created certain art, what Riegl called
Kunstwollen
, or the “will to art.” In 1906, one of Lipps's students, Wilhelm Worringer, proposed a seminal theory that coupled his professor's writing on empathy with that of another professor, the Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel. Adopting Simmel's use of binaries—a relativist view that held that to understand one concept, such as symmetry, one should also consider its opposite, asymmetry—Worringer described the binary that he believed defined all of art history, and titled his book after it,
Abstraction and Empathy
.

But it was psychologists who transformed the obscure term from German art history into the cornerstone of human emotion that we understand as empathy today. In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
. He went on to advance Lipps's research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person's place,” he said.

Little known outside of specialist circles today, Lipps was a kind of intellectual celebrity and a highly sought-after speaker. On Friday nights he hosted a lively psychology club, where participants debated the distinction between actions and nonactions, and logicians pitted themselves against psychologists. For a time Lipps also edited an art journal that had the ambitious aim of chronicling the history of art, not dating back to the earliest paintings, but to the origins of creativity
itself. When he was appointed chair of the University of Munich's philosophy department in 1894, thinkers and artists from around the Continent signed up for his classes. The Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi was a student, as was Wassily Kandinsky, from Russia. Lipps's foundational aesthetics course was also one of the first Rilke enrolled in upon his arrival from Prague.