You Must Change Your Life Read Online Free Page A

always something “too big, too hard, too close,” and it often portended a painful transformation; a rebirth contingent upon the downfall of that which came before him.
    Indeed, it was a death that chaperoned the poet’s very entrance into the world, on December 4, 1875. A young housewife from a well-to-do family, Sophia Rilke lost an infant girl a year before giving birth to her only son. From the moment he was born, she saw him as her replacement daughter and christened him with the feminine name René Maria Rilke. Sometimes she called him by her own nickname, Sophie. Born two months prematurely, the boy stayed small for his age and passedeasily for a girl. His mother outfitted him in ghostly white dresses and braided his long hair until he entered school. This splintered identity had mixed consequences for Rilke. On the one hand, he grew up believing that there was something fundamentally mistaken about his nature. But on the other, his acquiescence pleased his mother, which was something no one else seemed able to do, especially not his father.

    A young Rainer Maria Rilke, dressed as a girl, circa 1880 .
    Josef Rilke worked for the Austrian army as a railroad station master. He never rose to the officer’s rank that his well-bred wife had hoped for, and he spent the rest of his marriage paying for the disappointment. His good looks and early professional promise initially won his bride over, but Sophia prized status above all else and never forgave Josef for failing to bring her the noble title she had bargained for.
    Josef, meanwhile, resented the way she babied René, and later blamed her for the boy’s incessant versifying. He was not mistaken. Sophia had decided that if they weren’t going to be granted nobility, they wouldfake it, and so she began teaching René poetry in an attempt to “refine” him. She had him memorizing Friedrich Schiller verses before he could read and copying entire poems by age seven. She insisted he learn French, too, but certainly not Czech. Under the imperial rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech was relegated to the servant classes, while German became the dominant language in Prague.
    Born into this segregated city, Rilke quickly discovered that gender was not the only boundary that proved contradictory in his early life. He was part of Prague’s German-speaking minority, which enjoyed vast cultural and economic advantages over the Czech majority. Liberal families like the Rilkes wanted to live peacefully alongside the Slavs, but they kept to their own schools, theaters and neighborhoods, delineated by street signs written in their own language. Rilke would go on to speak Russian, Danish and French, but he always regretted never learning the language native to his homeland.
    When René turned nine, Sophia left Josef. She had become almost fanatically religious and, as Rilke later reasoned, was a woman who “wanted something indefinite of life.” By that time René had grown out of his girlish looks into a slender, narrow-shouldered adolescent and his parents sent him to live at the St. Pölten military academy near Vienna. Rilke was not opposed to following in his father’s footsteps, but not because he was interested in combat or physical training. He liked the elegant uniform, the order, and the rituals the military represented.
    But Sophia and Josef’s hope that their son might achieve what his father had not was promptly dashed. While the move had succeeded in replacing René’s dolls with dumbbells, it also thrust him into a roost with fifty brutal boys, with whom he had nothing in common. He quickly discovered that life at the academy had little to do with discipline or elegance.
    Young Rilke longed only to join the adult world. He was too intellectual to keep company with the working-class boys and he wasn’t refined enough for the aristocratic ones. Solitude might have suited him fine, but he