Rilke's poetry: “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Life is, after all, a story of Love. Love struggling in between the unformidable giants of fragility and mortality. Love's solace comes from its being a dreamer, a. dreamer of divine beauty and its eternal Presence. I find this echoed in the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), a Bohemian-Austrian poet, essayist, and novelist, one known for his most introspective, lyrical, and spiritually profound writings. He tries to transcend the human experience of love, art, solitude, suffering, and death as portals into the divine. Born in Prague, Rilke grew up in a strict Catholic household but was drawn early to art and mysticism. His masterpiece collections, Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , explore how human fragility, love, and mortality coexist with divine beauty and eternal presence. Rilke lived much of his life in solitude, seeing it as the necessary condition for artistic and spiritual awakening. He died in 1926 from leukemia, leaving behind a body of wor...