Rilke: “When I attempt to visualize my task, it becomes clear to me that it is not people about whom I have to speak, but things.”
around things “all movement subsides and becomes contour, and out of past and future time something permanent is formed: space, the great calm of objects which know no urge.”
Peter N. Miller: "By 1907 [...] Rilke had developed an ontology that linked humans and things. Upon this, he sketched out a model of what a historical study fit for this approach might look like. And he also hinted at a possible metaphysics, too, in which things explained not only the place of humans in this world, but our relationship to things eternal. This quest is carried to a still more refined level of mindfulness in the Duino Elegies, begun in 1912, and then completed, on the other side of the cataclysm that was the First World War, in 1923. Here, the full implications of objects for our fullest human nature is at the center of the exploration. Nothing less than the meaning of life is his inquiry."
Rilke: "Perhaps we are here, in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree,
window—at most: column, tower.”
Miller: "Rilke’s choices are not random. These are not merely common objects: they each define a point on the map of human existence, and altogether map the significant contours of life itself. The “house” stands for family and human society; “bridge” for what connects people and stories; “fountain” is the life giving power of nature for people; “gate” marks thresholds and regulates crossings; “pitcher” is the man-made instrument for bringing sustenance from nature to bodies; “fruit-tree” is both product of the elements and nourishment for people; “window” is how we and through which we see the world; “column, tower” the monumental scale of memory and association, but still on a continuum with the prior, more domestic, functions."