One of my favorite passages from Rilke, of which there are so many, is from a letter he wrote while beginning the Duino Elegies:
There the external thing itself—tower, mountain, bridge—already possessed the extraordinary, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents which one might have wished to represent it. Everywhere, appearance and vision merged, as it were, in the object; in each one of them a whole world was revealed, as though an angel who encompassed all space were blind and gazing into himself. This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task.
I keep this quote on an index card on the corkboard by my desk, where that word task rattles around with my Outlook Tasks, those colored flag icons, and notions like the task network describing the patterned brain activity when we’re “on task” and not mind wandering. Rilke often connects this task of vision and of transforming his vision into poetry to living in the here and now, being alive with all one’s senses tuned to what is really happening. I connect this vivid living to meditation, where I feel my task arising again and again, each time I notice a veil and push it gently away. Often these veils involve the tasks of daily life.
I also just read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which narrates his discovery, while in the concentration camps, and then summarizes his theory, of the key to a meaningful life. Frankl’s logotherapy, a method for treating existential frustration or the distress or malaise that comes from feeling life has no meaning or purpose, places at its center the discovery of a task that orients one toward meaning creation and self-transcendence. “In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were the most apt to survive” (104). While not at all discounting the great role of luck, he gave central importance to the discovery of the task—which could be a work, service, loving another person, or suffering with dignity. “… It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected of us” (77).
How will you respond to life? This question keeps arising in the reading I’m doing. What is your task? Just as important as asking these questions, I think, is keeping in mind that we’re not looking for One Big Task, necessarily. As Frankl assures the anxious, “The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment” (108).
What is the relation between this kind of task that brings meaning to life and the daily tasks that seem to get in the way of life? It can help to consider the historical kinship of the word task with the word tax. A task was a required payment, and then an imposed duty in the form of labor or work. The degree to which a task is imposed has a lot to do with how we feel about it and how much we consider it a response to what life asks. I resent some of my tasks and embrace others. “Duty” feels less desirable than “purpose.”
But the real task would be to equalize the value of all tasks within a sense of the greater good, something for which we also pay taxes. What is the greater good here? To be awake in every moment, to live vividly aware—of the wonder around us and the veils of judgment that obscure it—and not to renounce life by going through it, and all of its tasks, like an automaton. Rilke again: “There is no task as urgent for us as to learn daily how to die, but our knowledge of death is not increased by the renunciation of life; only the ripe fruit of the here and now that has been seized and bitten into will spread its indescribable taste in us” (117).
Sometimes my task is to bring order and beauty to sentences. Sometimes it’s to raise children with a sense of wonder and belonging. Sometimes it’s to bake better bread.
Quotes are from:
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York: Vintage, 2009, p. xiv.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Life, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer, New York: Modern Library, 2006.
Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon, 2006.