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We humans, with our mighty brain, like to use its powers to dwell on our own condition, which is precisely, but only partly, determined by the nature of this brain with which we have been equipped.

Themes like love, or an emphatic vulnerability to another being; our sense of time, with memories of our own lives and experiences from times when this brain was still young and absorbing the world and absorbing itself, or with anxiety about the life not yet lived; the material surroundings, with objects that become familiar extensions of our selves, or with some artifacts that awaken in us a feeling of elation and that we identify as “art�; dwellings that become our private spaces offering us comfort or a sense of constriction, or public ones where we cross others like us, or large rooms stacked with magic objects that are like little windows into the mind of another and which we call “books�; all these themes fascinate us and we relish meditating upon them.

But apart from all the above, there could be another recurring thought in this busily thinking brain. An obsession with its own incontrovertible and eventual void. Death.

Rilke spent some time during 1902 -03 in Paris, when he was in his late twenties, during which he dedicated himself to writing about art. He wrote on Rodin with whom he became quite close. May be his interest in the materiality of matter originates there. He also studied °äé³ú²¹²Ô²Ô±ð who was at the end of his days, and left a series of letters on his paintings, still revered by contemporary art historians and which I plan to be my next Rilke read Briefe über Cezanne.

He also started this fictional diary, supposedly written by a character called Malte Laurids Brigge, whose name we don’t get to know until about a full third into the book, although even then his identity remains elusive, and who, perhaps not coincidentally, has the same age as Rilke was when writing it. This work he did not finish until about 1908 while he was in Rome and was published in Paris when he returned, in 1910.

This is the only novel Rilke wrote. But it is not a novel really; he called it Prosabuch. As a series of poetic vignettes it has to be read slowly. With an interrupted reading one can deal better with the fragmentation in the inner narrative. It helps not to try and impose a linear development, for the vignettes (around seventy of them), are loosely connected by what at best could be understood as a personal recollections. A diary of observations, not of happenings.

So, this flâneur of the mind offers us visits to the streets of Paris, its libraries, and horrid hospitals, and we become lookers like him with a full range: myopia and hyperopia. Or he invites us to the opposite of urban existence: the mansion and gardens of his childhood in which we no longer know who is a ghost or who is a specter in his mind. And these the views of recollection are visually compressed.

Oppositions help in delineating meaning. And so as well as city-countryside, we see more of these that function like poles from which this tenuous non-narrative hangs. Seeing and blindness, love and loneliness, poverty and wealth, health and diseases, and most clearly of all, life and death.

But for me the most captivating parts were those in which the flâneur of aesthetics stays well alive, and tunes his senses for the discovery of art, whether this is his own writing--his quest in the search of poetry, or the magic contained in, for example, a cycle of tapestries--where he finds this sought poetry.

The way he beholds the Dame à la Licorne series is unsurpassed.