369 Rilke and the Search for God
The History of Literature
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Is There a Disease in Loneliness?
From the very first pages, where solitude is considered as a positive experience, i had thought of it as a kind of disease. So even before i read a line of rilka's poetry, i regarded him as a spiritual teacher and came to treat him in that small, light green covered book with the greatest respect. Mitchell says rilka was dealing with an existential problem opposite from the one that most of us need to resolve. Whereas we find a thick, if translucent barrier between self and other, he was often without even the thinnest differentiating membrane. And unlike more ounded people who have passed through the initial terror and experienced this openness as freedom, Rilka
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