Rilke is a man knowing love and wanted to change as a man:
"For centuries now, women have undertaken the entire task of love; they have always played the whole dialogue, both parts. For man has only echoed them, and badly. And has made the learning difficult with his inattention, with his neglect, with his jealousy, which is also a form of neglect. And they have nevertheless persevered day and night, and have grown in love and misery. And from among them, under the stress of endless need, have gone forth those valiant lovers, who, while they called him, rose above their man; who grew beyond him when he did not return, like Gaspara Stampa or like the Portuguese nun, who never desisted until their torture was transmuted into an austere, icy splendour which nothing could confine. We know about one and another because of letters, which as by a miracle have been preserved, or books of poems written in accusation or lament, or portraits in some gallery that look at us through a longing to weep which
the painter caught because he knew not what it was. But there have been innumerably many more: Those who burned their letters, and others who had no strength left to write them. Aged women, grown hard, but with a kernel of delight which they kept hidden. Uncouth, powerful women, who, made strong through exhaustion, let themselves grow gradually like their husbands, and who were yet entirely different in their inmost being, there where their love had laboured in the dark. Child-bearing women who never wanted to conceive, and who, when they finally died after their eighth child, had the gestures and the lightness of young girls looking forward to love. And those women who remained with their bullies and drunkards because they had found the means, in themselves, to withdraw far from them as they could nowhere else; and this they could not conceal, when they came among people, but were radiant as though they moved always with the blessed. Who can say how many they were, or who they were ? It is as if they had destroyed beforehand the words in which they might be described.
BUT now that so much is being changed, is it not time that we should change? Could we not try to develop ourselves a little, slowly and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labour of love? We have been spared all its hardship, and so it has slipped in among our distractions, as into a child’s drawer of toys sometimes a piece of real lace falls and pleases him and pleases him no longer and finally lies there among torn and dismembered things, worse than any of them. We have been spoiled by easy enjoyment, like all dilettanti, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes, what if we began from the beginning to learn the work of love which has always been done for us ? What if we were to go and become neophytes, now that so much is changing?"
__from Rilke <The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge>
