My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Sweatshirt

Berlin, autumn 1899: a rented room in Schmargendorf, twenty-five days, and the whole of Book I of Das Stunden-Buch came out of it. Rilke was twenty-three, back from Russia that spring, writing in the borrowed voice of a monk.

"I love my life’s dark hours
in which my senses quicken and grow deep,"
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours (1905), Book I, poem 6

— Jessie Lemont translation, 1918. Public domain.

Context

Lemont’s verb is quicken. Not soften, not settle — sharpen. The claim the poem makes about the late hour is a physical one: in it the senses take in more, not less.

That puts the dark hour on the same footing as any other working condition. It isn’t a mood you wait out. It’s a state you can enter on purpose — and dress for.

Who It’s For

You’re the one who puts something warmer on rather than go to bed.

• If you’ve ever chosen the cold end of the house because that’s where you think best
• If you’ve ever gotten up at one in the morning, pulled something on, and gone back to the work instead of back to sleep
• If the best thing you made this year happened after everyone else had stopped

Stay up.

The Design

Read it as a moon first — heavy along one edge, thinning to nothing along the other — then as what it is: an ensō, the Zen circle made in a single brushstroke and deliberately left unclosed. Both readings are meant to be there. The words go through it rather than around it.

Nothing fills the circle. What’s inside it is the sweatshirt, so the color changes the mark: on French Navy the dark runs warmer than black and the ensō reads as a moon, while on Black it reads closer to the brushstroke it is.

About This Sweatshirt

This one costs more than the tee. What the money buys is specific: the cotton is certified organic under GOTS and OCS, and the polyester in the fleece is recycled rather than virgin, certified under GRS. Those certifications cover the fiber content of the fabric.

• 8.3 oz/yd² brushed midweight fleece, built on a 100% organic cotton face
• 80% organic combed ring-spun cotton, 20% recycled polyester
• Medium fit — closer to the body than a relaxed cut
• Rib at the collar, cuffs and hem, in 100% cotton with no elastane
• French Navy or Black
• Machine wash cold, inside out; do not bleach; tumble dry low

Rainer Maria Rilke, in Plain English

• Lived 1875–1926 — born in Prague, wrote in German, worked across Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland
• Book I of Das Stunden-Buch was written in a rented room in Berlin-Schmargendorf between 20 September and 14 October 1899, months after his first trip to Russia
• He wrote it in the borrowed voice of a Russian monk, as a sequence of prayers rather than poems with titles
• Insel Verlag published the finished book — all three parts — in Leipzig in 1905
• Robert Bly’s later English version opens this line “I love the dark hours of my being.” The wording printed here is Jessie Lemont’s, from 1918 — the version in the public domain

More from this collection

• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke T-Shirt — the same quote, garment-dyed cotton
• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Organic T-Shirt — the same couplet, on 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton
• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Journal — the line printed unfinished, for writing into the hour
• My Life’s Dark Hours — Rilke Phone Case — the same ensō, carried
• The full Rilke collection