the symbol of the angel represents a perfection that is "beyond human contradictions and limitations" in a "higher level of reality in the invisible". Where there is incongruity that adds to mankind's despair and anxiety is due to human nature keeping us clinging to the visible and the familiar. As mankind encounters the invisible and unknown higher levels represented by these angels, the experience of the invisible will be "terrifying" (in German, ). As mankind came in contact with the terrifying beauty represented by these angels, Rilke was concerned with the experience of existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistence of the spiritual and earthly. He portrayed human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existent, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude". Rilke depicted the alternative, a spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations, in the form of angels. Beginning with the first line of the collection, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene. There is a deeply felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders humanity unable to reach out to the angels. The narrative voice Rilke employed in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being" (i.e. being, or existence, in German: ). Rilke used the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing mankind's potential and humanity's failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, Rilke wrote: Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter strange things in the midnight air. He depicted "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers", and contrasted a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion". At the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him ..." He noticed a "decline in the lives of lovers ... when they began to receive, they also began to lose the power of giving". Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men". In the face of death, life and love are not cheap and meaningless,