As mankind comes in contact with this terrifying beauty represented by these angels, Rilke is concerned with the experience of existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistence of the spiritual and earthly. He portrays 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".[1] Rilke depicts the alternative, a spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations in the form of angels.[27] Beginning with the first line of the collection, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene.[28] 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.[9] The narrative voice Rilke employs in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being" (i.e. being, or existence, in German: Dasein).[29]