We are unable to accomplish this quest. We try to postpone everything. The animals and flowers accomplish it, they become. They are able to endure the change. Either we do not try or we do not want to wait. We have no patience. What is needed is patience, to first learn to wait. Malte believes that greatness only comes when we suffer, endure, and wait. We have to accomplish everything else before we reach Him. It is only Him who practices restraint in order to let us grow, and understand, and become capable of love. Nobody understood Sappho in her time but she did not get distracted. She knew what she wanted to do. She did not stir from her path. She longed until the longing became the quest. It was perhaps not the man she loved but the one who might have been equal to her love that she lamented (Rilke 155). Malte wants young girls to aspire for such a love where they will not long for satisfaction but for their love to remain unrequited because only then they will not feel limited. The journey …show more content…
Malte writes, “To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is to glow bright with an inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure” (Rilke 161). Perhaps Abelone understood it in the end, as Malte would have wished her to. She might have understood that the change was essential for her Being, that she always had to be in continued change to discover herself again and again. Who knows that she might have wrote letters that expressed the change! How the one who read them might have suffered! The change in her would have been appalling, the change that occurs when something is happening inside the person, and the person knows it and seems to relish it. This is the change that occurs when one embarks on the journey of love, of longing, of suffering, of passion, and of knowing oneself. It occurs when God lets the person be, and accomplish everything else in life before coming to completion, before