You Must Change Your Life Read Online Free Page B

wouldn’t be so lucky. To his classmates, René wasfragile, precocious and a moral scold—all qualities that aligned into ideal crosshairs for bullies. In an account of one of the many attacks he suffered as a boy it becomes painfully clear why he was seen as a target:
    Once when I was struck so hard in the face that my knees shook, I said to my unjust attacker—I can still hear it—in the calmest of voices “I will suffer it because Christ suffered it, in silence and without complaining, and while you were striking me, I prayed to my dear Lord that he may forgive you.” The miserable coward simply stood there for a moment dumbfounded, then burst into a fit of scornful laughter . . .
    The boy went to the chapel to recover from his beating and to nurse his righteous indignation. It was around this time that he developed the chronic, undefined infirmity that would afflict him for the rest of his life. Some thought Rilke’s mysterious ailments were entirely imagined and, indeed, when a lung infection took the boy out of school for six weeks, he seemed to learn that sympathy could be a deft social strategy. But others who saw him in these states testified that his trembling muscles and pallid complexion were too convincing to discount.
    In any case, the sickroom became Rilke’s sanctuary at military school. It provided immediate asylum from his antagonizers and, more importantly, allowed him time and space to read. Lying in bed, he rolled around with sentences day and night. He cried into pages of Goethe. His grades in literature classes started to improve, though they dropped in fencing and gym. Despite his failing physical education, Rilke still thought he could be a military officer, and at one point tried to prove it to his instructors by writing an eighty-page “History of the Thirty-Years War.”
    At the suggestion of teachers, the boy began submitting poems to newspapers, and several were accepted. He survived on these small consolations until he turned fifteen, when, finally, his parents savedhim from that “dungeon of childhood,” as he called the academy. But he fared no better at the business school they sent him to next in the Austrian town of Linz. Noticing with “scorn and uneasiness” that his son was still writing poems, Josef tried to convince René to focus more on his studies and write only on the weekends. He saw no reason why his son couldn’t maintain both a job and a hobby, which was how he saw poetry. But to René, his poems were his “dream children,” and nothing was more upsetting than the thought of sacrificing them to a dull office job. He had decided that the artist who only wrote on the weekends was “not an artist at all.”
    Within the year, René’s Uncle Jaroslav took pity on the boy and offered to pay for a private tutor in Prague so he could finish his studies at home. A prosperous lawyer, René’s uncle was now known as Jaroslav von Rilke, having achieved the noble title that so painfully eluded his brother. Jaroslav had no trouble covering the expense and, with no surviving sons of his own, saw René as a potential protégé to one day take over his law firm and legacy.
    Jaroslav instituted a stipend to support René during the remainder of his high school education and through university. Of course, the aspiring poet had no intention of going to law school. He had made up his mind to become a writer—a detail he was able to spare his uncle, for Jaroslav died of a stroke that winter.
    Although Rilke did not carry out his uncle’s wishes, he did not squander the man’s generosity. The year following his graduation he wrote dozens of short stories, plays, news articles and launched his own literary journal. He joined a writers’ group and even made a few friends. In 1894, Rilke published his first book, a volume of gushing love poems titled Life and Songs that was inspired by his