Poets |
For Kafka, this doomed the project of immediacy—“How did people ever get the idea they could communicate by letter!”—but for Rilke and Kappus it was an essential feature of letter writing’s occult technology. “So much has to happen,” Rilke warned Kappus, in his second letter, “has to go right, a whole constellation of circumstances has to be in place, for anyone to actually advise, much less help, another person.” They were in many ways out of synch, misaligned. But, precisely because their letters produced so many ghostly selves, they made it possible for Rilke and Kappus to meet in a higher realm. The constellations we see in the night sky have, after all, been formed by light sent from vastly distant points in space and time.