Rainer Rilke's "The Wait" and the Agony & Ecstasy of Being Between Stations.
On the passage of time.
“The Wait,” by the Austrian writer Rainer Rilke (1875-1926):
It is life in slow motion,
it’s the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.
It’s a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage
door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.
Like John Keats before him, Rilke is an apt progenitor and archetype for the sadboi. More broadly, he’s a precursor to the sort of moody, un-gendered artful angst that every other guy or gal seems to have picked up from the likes of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People.
Rilke’s verse and poetry is filled with melancholy. The imagery fritters between senses and sometimes seems to exist without any senses at all — activating neither sound, nor smell, nor sight, nor touch, nor taste, yet still revealing. Like the way a few sketched lines on a page can become a person’s face. His cadence is frenetic and throbbing, yet thoughtful. It seems designed to match the thumps of your lovesick heart.
If he were alive in the age of instagram, I feel certain that Rilke would shoot only on film, captioning his collages and posts with the kind of tossed off meaningful meaninglessness that abounds on the platform — all in lowercase of course.
This is not to disparage or dismiss Rilke or his work. More than once I’ve turned to him to find inspiration, understanding, clarity, compassion. That is, after all, what language is for. To use, to share, to take us to the edge and to pull us back, to make us feel less alone, less trapped in ourselves, in our thoughts.
I am drawn to “The Wait” in particular. I always find myself reading the first verse at least twice. I am ashamed to say that I don’t recall much from high school english so I can’t quite place my finger on what it is about the first that speaks to me. Or maybe that’s exactly it. The mystery within it, the depths I feel certain it has yet to unveil, make me read and re-read, searching.
In “The Wait,” Rilke conjures a train between stations, the sensation of leaning your head out the window and looking both ways — to past and future, the echo of crickets soft and constant in your ears.
A train between stations is a liminal space within a liminal space. The stations already themselves meet every criteria for the transience that marks such a spot. And yet, Rilke takes us deeper into impermanence, into uncertainty.
With his final line “…made imaginary by this stop” Rilke summons the old aphorism: ‘if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Is the meadow really there if no one feels the grass glide between their fingers? What becomes of a destination un-ventured to, untethered from time as we measure it?
It’s a poem about patience — a poem about ‘waiting’ of course. I don’t know what Rilke himself was waiting on — if he was waiting on anything — when he wrote it. Maybe a letter, maybe lunch.
It captures the sensation of suspended animation I get when I find myself lost between frames of mind, between existences.
By ‘existences’ I guess I mean feelings, thoughts, ideas. All these things that seem real, but are not. Not really. An idea unspoken, a feeling unshared — these are less than dreams, yet they require the steel and wood and care of tracks across your mental landscape. They only exist between stations — the constant cry of crickets in the night air.
In my ADHD, sometimes a thought gets trapped inside my head. I can’t shake it loose — no matter how hard I try. There have been days in my life where I’ve spent hours, so much mental energy, analyzing something as careless and small as making eye contact on the street with a complete stranger. Hours.
I envy anyone who can let a thought slide out of their mind, out of their hands, with nothing more than a flick of the wrist, a twist of the head — wiping their hands when they’re through. Having a thought — something that seems so simple — has rarely been so easy for me. They’re there — the thoughts and feelings. It’s getting them to leave — party guests who don’t know when to quit — that’s the trouble.
So, like Rilke, I wait. I try to skid to a stop — to force life into slow motion. Mixed results so far. Even more so since I had to start rationing my medication to make it through the current adderall shortage.
I was talking to my brother a few weeks ago about the passage of time, specifically about the way education lies in the subtlest and yet most insidious ways to kids about how life works. When you’re in school, you can measure the day in such easy chunks. 45 minute periods. Bells. Homework assignments with explicit due dates. Semesters that begin and end like clockwork. Even in college you can measure time by the grades you get on papers, by the stubble growing on your most tired, anxious friend’s face.
What comes next is more complicated. Life moves slower, which ironically makes it move faster. The glacial pace of the tortoise that outstrips the hare. There are no semesters. No school bells. If you measure adulthood by the same hallmarks as you did youth, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
In high school, you got a grade almost every week, but at work you might find yourself promoted only once every thirteen or fifteen months — if you’re lucky. It’s always weird increments like that too. Fifteen months. 23 days. Forget the 365 day year. Throw out your puppy and kitten calendars. Accomplishments don’t recognize seasons. Neither do complications, the tricky and finicky life matters that seem to pop up all the time. Add even more if you — like me — have a neurologically bad habit of creating headaches where none need exist. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to make whipped cream without any cream or any tools — no whisks or mixers. Just my bare hands circling an empty bowl.
But, all you — all I — can do is wait.
I am not a very patient person, most of the time at least. But the world imposes patience upon you, upon me. It imposes unscheduled stops. You have to wait it out. I have to wait it out.
As Rilke suggests, the feeling is a “hope and a half”: you see, or think you see, the future stretching ahead of you. The track is there. And yet, you stand still. Maybe that track is just a mirage — wishful thinking. That’s what makes the wait more than hope, but still “too little all at once.”
Rilke seems to say that when you find yourself between stations the best you can do is soak up the surroundings, to “vainly contemplate a wind” that brushes your face, to rest your gaze on the curvature of the rustling grass, to hear the crooning crickets.
But by using the word “vainly,” Rilke makes clear that he thinks that kind of presentness — that awareness of only the moment and nothing else — is something of a fruitless endeavor, more wishful thinking. At least for the artist. Because even as the artist contemplates the breeze, breathes it in, they turn to “feelings,” sensations, descriptions. In an effort to make sense of the world, they suck themselves right out of it. At least it feels like that to me.
And so you and I are back to waiting.
As we wait, breath escapes us the way the past and the present do, slipping between our lips and into the air. I think that’s partly why we are so intent on sharing so much with so many others. Even strangers who plague our thoughts after barely making eye contact.
The best version of this exists in art, in media, in conversation. In the most innocent way, there’s something kind of magical — stirring — about talking to someone, especially someone you like or love. You breathe the past and present into their atmosphere and they do the same for you. And in that way you try to form the future.
In the meantime, I guess we’ll wait. You and I, together.