It's cold today, even the Buddha statues are wearing knit red caps. The gardens are welcoming, the signs not so much: NO GRAFITTI, NO CARVE, OFF LIMITS, OFF LIMITS. Temples grow old without getting any older; unlike me. Carol strolls among giant bamboo, dusty green, 6-inch diameter trunks, 40 feet high. I sit and write. The bamboo pass through me, my pen, are distilled into ink. Life: we enter, we exit, in the middle are bamboo, and maybe a few people. A century from now, I will be gone, the people will be gone, the temple will remain, and it will be someone else's job to distill the bamboo.
October 6th: Our B&B had a cute breakfast bar that included a milk-foaming machine.
It rained heavily all day, so we didn’t do anything or go out, except for dinner.
Pastas for first courseChicken with ratatouille and potatoes, plus grilled vegetables, for second course.
October 7th: Duino is famous for many things. On September 5, 1906, Ludwig Boltzmann hanged himself here while on vacation with his wife and children. He had been in bad health, and depressed because most mainstream scientists rejected his theories. He should have stuck around; over the next few years his ideas were spectacularly vindicated. But remember, we’re talking about a time when (for example) over half of all chemists didn’t think atoms were real. Defenders of physics orthodoxy could be real assholes, just like today. He had to put up with a lot of criticism from e.g. Ernst Mach and the logical positivists.
Crudely, logical positivism says that you should not have anything in your theories that does not correspond to something you can either perceive directly or measure with instruments. No one had seen an atom, and no one had detected a single atom with an instrument; therefore, any theory talking about atoms was automatically flawed, malformed, grotesque, and entirely the wrong way to think about things.
This was the kind of pompous idiotic shit that drove Boltzmann to suicide.
Bohr and Heisenberg were logical positivists. Heisenberg’s “matrix mechanics” painstakingly avoided talking about what actually happens inside an atom. It was all like, here are the inputs, and here are the outputs, and that’s all you can ever know.
It seems sensible to discard all hope of observing hitherto unobservable quantities, such as the position and period of the electron… Instead it seems more reasonable to try to establish a theoretical quantum mechanics, analogous to classical mechanics, but in which only relations between observable quantities occur.
Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (1999), p.161
Meanwhile, Schrödinger had been taking de Broglie’s theory of particle waves seriously. There must be some sort of wave mechanics that described how they behaved. At a gathering, an older physicist scoffed at the very idea. “How can you have a wave theory when you don’t have a wave equation?”
It was a reasonable objection. There’s a wave equation for how water moves, another for how sound travels through air, another for a guitar string or a wiggled slinky. You aren’t considered to understand any of those phenomena until you can write down the wave equation and solve it.
So Schrödinger tried to devise such a wave equation. He had most of the key ideas by December 1925, when he went on a ski vacation with his girlfriend. (His wife, who knew, was having an affair with mathematician Hermann Weyl at the time, and was probably happy to have him out of the house.) All the pieces finally fell into place, and he came down off of the mountain in January with the now-famous Schrödinger equation.
It was a horror to the positivists. Heisenberg wrote to Pauli, “The more I think about the physical portion of Schrödinger’s theory, the more repulsive I find it…. What Schrödinger writes about the visualizability of his theory “is probably not quite right”; in other words it’s crap.”
But it wasn’t crap. It explained everything. Spectroscopy. Atomic bonds and chemistry. Crystals, and eventually transistors and integrated circuits. Nobel prize after Nobel prize followed. The positivists had been spectacularly wrong again.
However, I didn’t come to Duino because of Schrödinger, or because of Boltzmann (whose grave-shrine is in Vienna). I came because of Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived in Castello di Duino as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. The Duino Elegies were started here in 1912. Many of Rilke’s poems are dedicated “to” or “for” someone, but when he finally finished the Elegies in 1922 he called them “property of” Princess Marie.
The castle construction started in 1389.There’s a large park and gardens next to it.The ruins of an earlier 11th century castle are nearby.
And before I knew it, we had arrived at the holy of holies; the balcony where Rilke heard the first line of the first Elegy: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (“Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the ranks of angels?”)
At least, that’s the myth. Duino Castle was heavily damaged by bombing in WW I, and had to be rebuilt. Maybe this balcony survived, maybe it was reconstructed. And a different story says that Rilke was walking the trail along the cliffs in the background. But we desire certainty, so we say: It was here.
But there was still a lot more castle to explore.
On the parapets
Rilke would have been comfortable here, as the castle was luxuriously furnished.
Finally, it was time to leave the castle and embark on the “Rilke walk”.
A short stub of the hike leads back towards the castle.There are many nice viewing points, some with benches. These were repurposed from WW I anti-aircraft installations manned by the Austro-Hungarian K. u. K. Kriegsmarine. They would not have been there yet in RIlke’s time.Looking back at the castle.
After the hike, we headed back to our B&B, checked out, and got on the road again.
One last view of Duino Castle on our way out of town.
Lunch was meat grilled on a metal skewer, which came to the table sizzling hot.
Then we drove all the way to Poreč, Croatia. Dinner was less elaborate, just Croatian fast food.
Carol got squid rings, and I went for ćevapi again.
Singe die Gärten, mein Herz, die du nicht kennst; wie in Glas
eingegossene Gärten, klar, unerreichbar.
Wasser und Rosen von Ispahan oder Schiras,
singe sie selig, preise sie, keinem vergleichbar.
Zeige, mein Herz, daß du sie niemals entbehrst.
Daß sie dich meinen, ihre reifenden Feigen.
Daß du mit ihren, zwischen den blühenden Zweigen
wie zum Gesicht gesteigerten Lüften verkehrst.
Meide den Irrtum, daß es Entbehrungen gebe
für den geschehnen Entschluß, diesen: zu sein!
Seidener Faden, kamst du hinein ins Gewebe.
Welchem der Bilder du auch im Innern geeint bist
(sei es selbst ein Moment aus dem Leben der Pein),
fühl, daß der ganze, der rühmliche Teppich gemeint ist.
Sing the gardens, my heart, which you know not; clear,
unreachable, like gardens cast in glass.
Water and roses from Isfahan or Shiraz:
sing blessings, praise them, nothing can compare.
Point out, my heart, that you never miss these.
That intended for you are their ripening figs.
That you fly through them, between blossoming twigs,
just like over a face blows the rising breeze.
Don't ever believe that bereavement is due
to a choice that you made: namely, to be!
Silk thread, in this fabric you're woven all through.
And no matter what image you hold to be you
(even if it's a moment of sheer agony),
know the whole awesome tapestry's purpose is true.
Wo, in welcher immer selig bewässerten Gärten, an welchen
Bäumen, aus welchen zärtlich ent blätterten Blüten-Kelchen
reifen die fremdartigen Früchte der Tröstung? Diese
köstlichen, deren du eine vielleicht in der zertretenen Wiese
deiner Armut findest. Von einem zum anderen Male
wunderst du dich über die Größe der Frucht,
über ihr Heilsein, über die Sanftheit der Schale,
und daß sie der Leichtsinn des Vogels dir nicht vorwegnahm und nicht die Eifersucht
unten des Wurms. Gibt es den Bäume, von Engeln beflogen,
und von verborgenen langsamen Gärtnern so seltsam gezogen,
daß sie uns tragen, ohne uns zu gehören?
Haben wir niemals vermocht, wir Schatten und Schemen,
durch unser voreilig reifes und wieder welkes Benehmen
jener gelassenen Sommer Gleichmut zu stören?
Where, in which always blissful watered garden, on which trees,
from which tenderly-stripped-of-petals blossom-calyces
ripen the exotic fruits of consolation? Those ample,
tasty, of which you maybe find one in the trampled
meadow of your poverty. At one or another time
you wondered at the size of the fruit,
at the softness of its skin, at its being unharmed,
and that the thoughtlessness of a bird didn't beat you to it
nor the jealousy of a worm below. Are there then trees, thronging
with angels, and by slow secluded gardeners so strangely trained,
that they bear us, without to us belonging?
Have we never been able, we shadows and shades,
through our hasty ripening and withering again
to disturb the repose of those calm summer glades?
Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen
in den zerstreuten Gärten der Stadt:
wie wir uns fanden und uns zögernd gefielen
und, wie das Lamm mit dem redenden Blatt,
sprachen als schweigende. Wenn wir uns einmal freuten,
keinem gehörte es. Wessen wars?
Und wie zergings unter allen den gehenden Leuten
und im Bangen des Langen Jahrs.
Wagen umrollten uns fremd, vorübergezogen,
Häuser umstanden uns stark, aber unwahr,- und keines
kannte uns je. Was war wirklich im All?
Nichts. Nur die Bälle. Ihre herrlichen Bogen.
Auch nicht die Kinder ... Aber manchmal trat eines,
ach ein vergehendes, unter den fallenden Ball.
In memoriam Egon von Rilke
You few, playmates of former childhood in
the city's scattered gardens and walks:
how we found each other and slowly became friends
and, like the lamb with the scroll that talks,
spoke though mute. If sometime we exulted,
no one owned it. Whose could it be?
And how it crumbled among the hustling multitude
and in the long year's anxiety.
Cars rolled past, ephemeral to us, alien,
houses stood near, sturdy but untrue - and none
ever knew us. What was real in the All?
Nothing. Just the balls. Their glorious arcs.
Not even the children ... but sometimes one, in the park,
one passing by, stepped under the falling ball.
In memoriam Egon von Rilke
Translation notes:
Line 4: “das Lamm mit dem redenden Blatt”. “Blatt” can mean leaf, sheet, page, or anything thin and flat. But in this case the line seems to be a reference to Revelations 5, where a lamb with 7 horns and 7 eyes takes “a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals” and a hundred million angels praise its worthiness.
White house, brown woodwork, red roof tiles, brick chimney;
maypole with ribbons all woven around it;
afternoon sunlight through trellis and ivy;
flower bed purple and orange and scarlet;
wrought iron bench with cobwebs aplenty;
churchbell strikes six with a faraway sound;
tiny pink roses, fuschia, honeysuckle;
part of the fence looks about to fall down;
rustling of leaves from a breeze that's too gentle
to ring the rusty windchime; robins
tweeting and chasing each other in pairs;
stop-and-go swirl of flies braiding the air.
Some parts show evidence of an intelligence
shaping and digging and planting to plan.
Some parts look wild, overgrown and abandoned,
nature reclaiming as much as she can.
Somehow,
this marriage of care and neglect,
this interpenetration of will and wildness
at the border of order and verdure,
embodies a basic human desire
for heaven; trowel in hand, Michaelangelo's Adam
reaching out to touch a green and leafy god.
Energy and Time 