“Everything has been said about these great churches,” Rilke wrote. “Victor Hugo penned some memorable pages on Notre-Dame in Paris, and yet the action of these cathedrals continues to exert itself, uncannily alive, inviolate, mysterious, surpassing the power of words. Notre-Dame grows each day, each time you see it again it seems even larger.” Rilke, with his youthful anxiety, found Paris to be “rushing headlong out of orbit, like a planet, toward some terrible cataclysm.” During his first days, all he saw behind the trees of the long avenues were “hospitals all over the place” and “long monotonous buildings.” He clung to the few things he regarded as different, like “the great old man,” Rodin, with whom things would end badly, and the sumptuous statue of Nike of Samothrace, at the Louvre, which made him feel the breath of Greece instead of the heavy, oppressive, mournful, solitary, dead air of Paris.
THIS EVENING AT MASS, there was a baptism of a small child, and I thought about how Rilke found Paris’s churches to be closer to nature than the public gardens, which were, for him, too much like works of art. Instead, he deemed the city’s big churches to be “uncannily alive,” with their solitude and calm that is “inviolate,” even in the middle of the metropolis. During our church service, a white-robed monk dipped the naked baby into a baptismal font three times, bathing him with water that his parents had brought from the Jordan River, which flows through Israel and Palestine. Then the baby—like a fish gripped at its head and foot—was lifted up into the altar’s bright spotlight so that all of us in the congregation could see his shining pink flesh.
After dusk, before the vespers candles are lit, I—an agnostic—always feel alone in the darkness of that heap of crumbling stone. A hand held in front of my face is invisible in the dank dark, where the only real light is the light of the imagination—until morning, when sunlight once again penetrates the stained-glass windows of the apostles, among them Matthew, the evangelist, who said, “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life.” After the religious service, out in the square, there was a great drama after a handsome black-and-white duck escaped from a butcher’s shop. Three men with ladders, brooms, and stones were trying to capture the frightened creature, which plainly understood that it was soon to be eaten for Sunday dinner. I remembered the Jean de La Fontaine fable in which a drunken cook mistakenly thrusts a swan instead of a duck into his stew pot, and just as he is on the verge of cooking him, the swan’s melodic death song forces the cook to open his bleary eyes (“What have I done?”). A sensible man would never put such a fine crooner in his soup, he thinks. The lesson of the fable is that, when confronted with danger, a song (or poem) doesn’t do any harm at all.
MY FAMILY’S FIRST PET, when I was a boy, was a Siamese cat named Chou-Chou, which means “little cabbage,” though Chou-Chou was a muscular hunter who roamed the streets every night and left his trophies—lifeless sparrows and robins, mostly—on our doorstep. Sadly, one day, he didn’t return to us. Half a century later, to honor him, I’ve translated (from the French) an essay by Rilke about cats, written to accompany a suite of black ink drawings by his eleven-year-old friend Balthasar Klossowski, who became the Polish French modernist artist Balthus, whose mother was Rilke’s friend. When Balthus was a boy, he adopted a stray cat named Mitsou, and when the beloved Mitsou mysteriously disappeared, Balthus was so heartbroken that he commemorated the relationship in forty expressive drawings, which delighted Rilke—a sort of father figure—so much that he arranged for their publication. Rilke’s introduction begins:
Who knows cats? Is it possible that you really only claim to know them? I admit that for me their existence has always been a fairly risky proposition.
Animals, of course, must enter our world a little in order to belong to it. It is necessary for them to accept, no matter how small a part, our way of life and to tolerate it; otherwise, being either hostile or timid, they will grasp the distance between us, and this will become the basis of their connection.
Look at the dogs: their confident and admiring attitude is such that some of them appear to have renounced the oldest traditions of dogdom in order to worship our own customs and even our foibles. It is just this which renders them tragic and noble. Their choice to accept us forces them to dwell, so to speak, at the limits of their real natures, which they continually transcend with their human gazes and melancholy snouts.
But what is the demeanor of cats?—Cats are cats, briefly put, and their world is the world of cats through and through. They look at us, you say? But can you ever really know if they deign to hold your insignificant image for even a moment at the back of their retinas? Fixating on us, might they in fact be magically erasing us from their already full pupils? It is true that some of us let ourselves be taken in by their insistent and electric caresses. But these people
