The elegies get their name from the fact that Rilke started them while living alone in a castle on the shores of the Adriatic Sea in what once was Yugoslavia.

In sum, the poems add up to a long examination poetic of this question: Who cares about what happens to me in a world that has become increasingly alienated from itself and, as Rilke saw it, God?

Viewing today's world almost a century later, a world involved in a terrible war, a war without quarter that constantly threatens to grow larger, I sometimes find myself asking the same question, perhaps not in such elegant language, but asking it, anyway.

In Rilke's day it was just as easy to ask that question as it is today. Victorian society, with all its false fronts and inequalities was about to collapse into World War I. The Europe into which Rilke had been born and in which he had grown up would soon be shattered, and it would be almost a century before it put itself back together.

Death, despair, mindless conflict and more was on the way.

The cry of the man alone in the castle was echoed by Franz Kafka's anti-hero in his famous short novel The Castle (in which a man arrives at a village below a castle and tries vainly to see the lord of the manor--God), which was about to be written. Kafka, who lived and soon was to die in Prague, Czechoslovakia, looked out on the same kind of world.

The madness of totalitarianism was about to engulf Germany and Russia, just as the conflict between the Middle East and the West constantly threatens the world today.

Then, as now, men and women asked why, why it was happening to them?

So it's not a new question.

We all would like to know why we're here, what we are supposed to do to find salvation and redemption, even to be no more than content, to find some kind of peace.

And thinking of this made me remember yet a third work of literature, a recent one. Name All the Animals by Alison Smith is a memoir of a Catholic girl growing up in a strict Catholic family whose brother dies at 18 in a terrible auto accident.

The family wants to know why this happened to them and, in a larger sense, why bad things happen to good people--or at least people who are trying to be good.

Each of the three surviving family members finds their answer in a different way.

Alison's father plunges more deeply into Catholicism. He begins talking to saints' statues as if they were alive and orders up serial memorial Novenas.

Her mother becomes immersed in activity--it doesn't matter what kind, just activity. She gets a used van and fixes it up as if her son were still alive. She goes off on longer and longer hikes with a knapsack filled with the increasing number of volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she ordered for her son before he died. (They arrive two volumes at a time in the mail, which makes her load increasingly heavy, almost as if it were punishment.)

And Alison, the daughter and sole surviving child, embarks on her own quest for an answer and finds it, sort of, in a short and mostly unhappy love affair with a fellow student in an all-girl Catholic high school.

In the process she loses her religion. She has a vision of Christ walking away and leaving her alone.

I suppose if we took a poll of those we know--even if we simply observed those we know--we would see as many or even more answers to these most basic of human questions: Why are we here, and why did this happen to me? Why is the world the way it is, and what does it mean for me?

Most likely, too, we will receive differing answers. That's certainly been my experience, anyway.

When I was younger I knew a family with a single child, a son. The son was killed in combat in World War II--even as sons and daughters are dying today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The parents reconciled themselves to their loss, but it took a long time and it was never quite realized.

I should add I'm not trying to sell you this solution any more than Alison Smith is trying to tell us it's possible to find contentment, even salvation, through a lesbian love affair. Her book, like Kafka and Rilke, offers no magic formula.

And I don't think there is one.

I think we each find our answers in different ways and I also think sometimes we never find them.

This, of course, is not enough for some people. Like Alison's father, they want to believe that if they keep the faith with which they were raised, everything will come out all right. And, for some, it will.

But for the rest of us, those who face a world filled with Iraqs and Katrinas and plain old terrible automobile accidents, the question remains: Who among the angels will hear my cry?