We wish to grasp the world and see that grasping as an achievement, but we do this not looking for happiness. We wish to avoid what must come but, at the same, time long for it. These ambivalences define who we are. At the center of the Elegy is the imperative that we should open ourselves to the immediate presence of the world, because “being here is so much.” And we should do it now. For time is Kairos, that “just once” that knows no past and no future, but which allows us to reach a point of contact with another realm (“Bezug”), to which we bring (if we can carry it so far) “the heaviness of being.” The latter will allow us to pass through the abject state of modernity, where “more than ever / things fall apart.” Here we must learn to say and live by the simple word. We must say the simple word to the Angel and show him what we have achieved through words that belong to simple things, and we must transform them and us by taking them into “our invisible hearts.” Elegy 9 concludes with a eulogy to the earth, as if the transcendent will never be enough, and to “superabundant being,” a rare gesture of unqualified optimism in Rilke's Elegies.