He writes to Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín, wife of the writer Karl Kraus, whose brother killed himself, about how we carry the dead.

He writes of his Duino Elegies (1923), his highly wrought sequence of poems and masterpiece, that their “secret thesis” is that the most painful events of life can also be the most defining. He suggests that loss, although apparently disabling, can involve a reconstituting of self and writes that the disturbance of death leads to “a new order” within – loss as a lens. He describes death as “the dark interval” that leads to illumination and may even disinter a kind of joy. I did not want the contamination of anything bogus or trifling.

I remembered looking through poems to find something to read at my mother’s funeral and feeling I knew, unhesitatingly, with what may have been deluded clarity, what was “true” and what was not. Reading this book, I recalled the strange sense I had, after my mother died, of missing a skin and of having an altered critical radar. He insists we should not aspire to being consoled but be 'curious' to explore loss as an inner landscape “Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual, because its innermost essence is not contrary to us.” He sees death as the other half of life, sure as shadow. We can, he believes, live more intensely because of it. But he also dwells on the way death throws life into sharper relief. His conviction was that we must not turn away from death. He knows that words, weak though they might seem, are strength and must be thrown in death’s path. He is as unplatitudinous as it is possible for the author of letters of condolence to be. He never tells bereaved correspondents that time will heal nor falls into the common trap of trying, with the best intentions, to demote death. Rilke recognises that the death of people we love is the greatest challenge but sees that death is insurmountable. He was drawn to the idea, expressed in his poetry, that difficulty in life is essential, that we should not attempt to evade it, that it contributes to achievement, fulfilment and self-knowledge. The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and necessary. This slender book, a selection of letters of condolence, available for the first time in English, is a treasure. R ainer Maria Rilke had written 14,000 letters by the time of his death in 1926, aged 51.

Rilke letter 8