Lewis Hyde

Afraid of what?
Afraid, I think, that he might never become his own person

He lived in fear of two false fates: either that he might end up as lost as the ragged poor who had surrounded him in Paris or else that he might succumb to the safe but numbing comforts of convention.

In the vision Rilke offers, solitude is not merely a matter of being alone: it is a territory to be entered and occupied