"Writing to a female admirer of his only novel, "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910), Rilke, perhaps with the war at the forefront of his mind, quickly turns to the question of how it is possible to live when life is so "incomprehensible." It isn't, he answers, unless we embrace all that is beyond our control, including death. We wrongly treat death as unnatural, Rilke argues. We bracket it out when we should accept it as part of the cycle of life. "When a tree begins to bud," Rilke writes, "both death and life spring up in it." To embrace death is to embrace the "incomprehensible," which, for the poet, is another name for God. As these letters show, Rilke's search for God was really a search for self." - Adriano