The young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, was a 19-year-old military cadet. He felt trapped by uniforms, drills, and the suffocating expectations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He sent Rilke his poems, hoping for technical advice on rhyme or meter. Instead, Rilke performed a kind of surgery on his soul.

Rilke’s most famous advice is also his most radical: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.”

Are you sad? Don’t drink it away. Sit in it. Rilke insists that sadness is not an enemy. It is a season. It is the soil going fallow so that roots can grow deep enough to survive the winter.

Our world moves at the speed of a click. Rilke’s world moved at the speed of sap rising in a tree. He writes: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign tongue.” He tells Kappus that he is trying to answer questions too early. You cannot force the answers any more than you can force a tree to blossom in December. The task is not to find the solution tonight. The task is to live the question until you grow into the answer.