He wrote letters. Many, many letters. When he died, aged 51, in 1926, Rainer Maria Rilke had written more than 14,000 letters. They’ve been collected. There’s the 270-page LETTERS ON LIFE. And at some point in your romantic life, you have given --- or received --- LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET. Among Rilke’s correspondence are 23 letters of condolence. Now, for the first time, they’ve been collected into a 94-page book: THE DARK INTERVAL: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation.

Letters were important for Rilke. He didn’t dash them off; he considered them equal to the poems that made him famous. The letters of condolence are more than smart ways to say “so sorry for your loss.” They’re meditations on loss and pain --- and a road map to acceptance and healing. Rilke is a big believer in time. It doesn’t console, he says; it does “put things in order.”

"You’ll mark this book often, you’ll turn many pages down. And you’ll never write clichés to grieving friends again --- you’ll quote Rilke."

Above all, he sees death as a key event that makes us live more fully. To a grieving friend: “When things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.” You’ll mark this book often, you’ll turn many pages down. And you’ll never write clichés to grieving friends again --- you’ll quote Rilke. [To buy THE DARK INTERVAL from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Some samples:

To: Mimi Romanelli
(1877–1970) known for her beauty and musical talent. Rilke stayed in her family’s small hotel in Venice in 1907. They had a brief romantic relationship and maintained a long correspondence thereafter.

December 8, 1907
There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape…. It is this idea of death, which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next and which compels me to humbly endure the small death so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.

To: Adelheid von der Marwitz
(1894-1944) She maintained a correspondence with Rilke.

September 11, 1919
Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual…. I always think that such a great weight with its tremendous pressure somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. I learned this experience very early on through various circumstances, and it was then confirmed from pain to pain: what is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it.

To: Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín
(1885-1950) She first met Rilke in 1906 and maintained a long friendship and correspondence with him. Her brother Johannes Nádherný von Borutín committed suicide in 1913.

August 1, 1913
On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength. But on the other hand, I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and attraction are after all also yours. You must, Sidie, you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it has been unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours… All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.