You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Page A

Worpswede painters. Then, in one week, he completed the second part of the Book of Hours . But their quiet solitude was soon interrupted when Westhoff found out she was pregnant and, by the end of the year, gave birth to a daughter. They gave her “the beautiful biblical name” Ruth.
    For all the molten emotion that poured from Rilke’s pen over the years, he managed to describe his daughter only in surprisingly vague abstractions. “Life has become much richer with her” was among the most effusive lines he came up with. To Rilke, Ruth completed the family unit and marked a necessary transition into maturity. But the unsayable hungers and tears of this “little creature” bewildered him.
    A few months after Ruth’s birth, in February 1902, Westhoff wrote to Becker about how she felt “so very housebound” now. Gone were the days when she could just pick up a bicycle and pedal off for an afternoon in the sun, bringing whatever she needed on her back. “I now have everything around me that I used to look for elsewhere, have a house that has to be built—and so I build and build—and the whole world still stands there around me. And it will not let me go . . . Therefore the world comes to me, the world which I no longer look for outside . . .”
    The letter enraged Becker. It wasn’t so much what she said, but how she said it. Westhoff’s words didn’t sound like her own. They sounded like Rilke’s. Becker tore into her friend with all the hurt and resentment that had been building for months. “I don’t know much about the two of you, but it seems to me that you have shed too much of your old self and spread it out like a cloak so that your king can walk on it.” Why wouldn’t Westhoff wear her own “golden cape again”? she wondered.
    To make matters worse, Westhoff had forgotten her friend’s birthday. “You have been very selfish with me,” Becker wrote. “Must love be stingy? Must love give everything to one person and take from the others?” Becker then turned her pen against Rilke. Enclosed in the same letter she wrote, “Dear Reiner [sic] Maria Rilke, I am setting the hounds on you. I admit it.”
    She begged him to remember their communal love of art, of Beethoven and the happiness they once shared as a little family in Worpswede. She thanked him for sending his latest book—it was “beautiful.” But in the next breath she insulted his writing: If he was going to respond to her letter, “please, please, please, don’t make up riddles for us. My husband and I are two simple people; it is hardfor us to do riddles, and afterward it only makes our head hurt, and our heart.”
    Two days later, Rilke fired back a withering retaliation. He told Becker that her love must be too weak for his new wife, for it had failed to reach her at a time when she needed it most. Was Becker really so selfish that she could not celebrate her friend’s newfound happiness? Why did she refuse to acknowledge the sacrifice he and Westhoff had made in order to be together?
    He reminded Becker that she herself had always praised Westhoff’s solitary nature. It made her a hypocrite to chastise her friend now for the very quality she had always admired. Why not “rejoice” in anticipation of the time when Westhoff’s “new solitude will one day open the gates to receive you? I, too, am standing quietly and full of deep trust outside the gates of her solitude,” he said. Then, authoring what would become one of his most lasting mythologies about marriage, Rilke added: “I consider this to be the highest task of the union of two people: that each one should keep watch over the solitude of the other.”
    Becker surrendered. No matter how self-serving Rilke’s rhetoric was, one could hardly compete with it when rendered this majestically. Becker responded only in her diary,