 
            20060131.01

         Pont du Carrousel

Der blinde Mann, der auf der Bruecke steht,
grau wie ein Markstein namenloser Reiche,
er ist vielleicht das Ding, das immer gleiche,
um das von fern die Sternenstunde geht,
und der Gestirne stiller Mittelpunkt.
Denn alles um ihn irrt und rinnt und prunkt.

Er ist der unbewegliche Gerechte
in viele wirre Wege hingestellt;
der dunkle Eingang in die Unterwelt
bei einem oberflaechlichen Geschlechte.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1902/03, Paris

My attempt at an English version:

         Pont du Carrousel

See that blind man, him standing at the bridge's gate,
Gray, like a boundary marker of some unnamed nation,
Perhaps he is the axis, the immutable relation,
Round which the stellar hours rotate:
The silent center of the universe;
For everything about him hastes and boasts and errs.

His just immovable perfection
is planted in the stream of many crooked ways;
the somber entrance for a superficial race
into the nether world's direction.


     I was reminded of Rilke's Pont du Caroussel poem by the
attendance of a partially deaf friend at a birthday party for
her. There is of course, a difference between being blind and
isolated, a signpost to the underworld, and being isolated by
deafness.  Furthermore the degree and nature of the isolation
will obviously depend on circumstances.

     I thought of the poem also in the context of the
recurring question: Why Kierkegaard? He was not blind; yet in
some respects he was isolated from the world as if he were.
The Greeks understood about Tiresias.  Admittedly not all
blind people are wise; and not all wise people are blind. But
somehow blindness and insight go together, or at any rate,
seem to do so.

     There is only one way to obtain an answer to ones
question: "Why Kierkegaard?" and that is to read his books.
Perhaps such reading itself will answer the question, and if
reading Kierkegaard does not suffice for an explanation, then
it is unlikely that an exegesis by a third party will provide
the answer.

     I interpret the history of modern philosophy as the
program of discovering reality in the individual rather than
in the world or in the society in which he lives. If this
project began with Descartes and his deduction of
epistemolological certainty from the consciousness of his own
existence, it was endorsed and promoted by Kant and
subsequently by Schopenhauer.  Neither of these authors
solved the enigma created by the presumption to communicate
about subjective experience by means of objective accounts or
descriptions. That task was left for Kierkegaard who
demonstrated how this could be accomplished within the
framework of the religious tradition.  Kierkegaard left
untouched the issue of how one might reconcile his account of
religious experience with the imperatives of the contemporary
scientific world.  That task remains to be accomplished.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
