|
24 •Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet • 25
that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it
is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be
one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love
another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been
entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all
other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners
in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With
their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious,
upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long,
secluded time ahead and far on into life, is—; solitude, a heightened and
deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first
mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a
union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent—?),
it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in
himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another
person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and
calls him to vast distances
|