It's funny how a change in seasons shakes me right out of the doldrums.  I was getting bored with summer, when along came autumn, and my old friend Rilke. 

Last night before bed I read William Gass's lyrical introduction to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.  Gass is one of my favorite living American writers.  I read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country in college, and was hooked (the gem of that collection, "The Pederson Kid", sets the tone for Gass's work:  it's nominally about three characters searching for a bottle of whiskey in the snow).  If the marvelous little curio On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry was all he'd ever written he'd have made my honors shelf. 

Mainly an author of stories and essays, it took Gass 26 years to finish his epic novel, The Tunnel.  Which makes him a literary hero as well.  I mean, to spend 26 years on a novel.  But why so long? "I write slowly because I write badly," he has said.  "I have to rewrite everything many, many times just to achieve mediocrity."  I can relate.

Rilke suffered a good deal, himself, during the writing of The Notebooks, his only novel.  He had found early fame easy on account of technical brilliance.  Not nothing in an age of brilliance — he spent time in Prague and St. Petersburg, and consorted with literary giants like Tolstoy and artists like Rodin. 

The journey inward that would yield his enduring masterpieces was much harder.  Not only because the delicacy and keen — even debilitating — sensitivity that made them possible also made them nearly impossible, but because about the time they began to blossom in him, Europe was plunged into the chaos of the First World War.  It literally took a village to enable Rilke to write the Duino Elegies, and his Sonnets to Orpheus. 

But back in 1902, according to Gass, "Rilke approached Paris with eagerness and relief."  Paris, however

grasped his outstretched spirit with a pair of gnarled and beggarly hands which wrung nothing but outcry out of him, mercilessly squeezing him until body and soul were only a dry husk around rented air.

Zoinks!

I'm no poet, and Boston's no Paris, but I feel that way sometimes.  I might feel that way in Cleveland, though — who knows?  And while Rilke resonates with me, the patron saint of my own travels, and their attendant travails, would have to be Orwell, whose Down and Out in Paris and London informed my own years here and abroad. 

Rilke's personality belongs to a different era.  When Paris — or at least The 5th arrondissement in the summertime — smelled of "iodoform, the grease of pommes frites, fear."  But there's an aura of timelessness about his poetry and prose.  And still plenty of useful advice.  The smell of iodoform, the grease of pommes frites, and fear may not agree with you, but "the main thing was, being alive.  That was the main thing."

And Rilke was nothing if not keenly alive and attuned to the life all around.  In Gass's inimitable phrase, "it was as if he saw the people, actions, and objects of the world as basins into which he might empty the apparently boundless bladder of his being."

I feel like that sometimes, too.  Don't you?

Whatever the case, I gotta say it — Rilke and Gass:  two great tastes that go great together.