This is the last letter from Rainer Maria Rilke to his friend and former lover Lou Andreas Salomé. The relationship began when twenty-one-year-old Rilke became besotted with the married woman, fifteen years his senior. They corresponded for twenty-nine years on every topic imaginable; of Salomé, Rilke wrote: “all that I am / Stirs me because of you.” At the time of this letter’s writing, Rilke was in the last stages of leukemia, recuperating in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He died less than two weeks after the postmarked date with his eyes open, resting in his doctors arms.
[Sanatorium Valmont, above Montreux]
Monday. [December 13, 1926]
So this you see was the thing for which during these last three years all the alerts and forewarnings of my watchful nature have been preparing me: but now my nature will have a very, very hard time surviving, since during this long interval it has exhausted itself in acts of help and correction and imperceptible adjustment; and before the present infinitely painful state with all its complications began to develop, it had undergone with me an insidious intestinal flu. And now, Lou, I know not how many hells, you know how I made a place for pain, for physical pain, the truly great one, in my accommodations, but only as an exception and as already a first step back into the open. And now. It encases me. It supplants me. Day and night!
Where to find courage?
Dear, dear Lou, the doctor writes you. Frau Wunderly writes you, who with all her impulse to help has come here for a few days. I have a good judicious garde-malade and believe that the doctor who is seeing me again now after three years, this time for the fourth time, is right. But. The hells.
With you, with both of you, how, Lou? Are you in good health? There is something malign blowing through the end of the year, something menacing.
Y. Rainer
From Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Trans. Edward Snow. New York: W.W. Norton (2006).
FURTHER READING
One of the last poems Rilke wrote before his death.
A review of the love letter collection, featuring a detailed account of the romance and friendship.
A volume of Rilke’s full correspondence.