People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all
their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it
is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it,
everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is
characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and
against all opposition. We know little,
but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake
us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is
difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
| Rainer Maria Rilke |
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to lover another: that is
perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and
proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are
beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their
forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward beating heart, they
must learn to love. But learning time is
always a long, secluding time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far
into life, is solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving
over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something
unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?); it is a high inducement to the
individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s
sake. It is a great exacting claim upon
him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at
themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use
the love that is given them. Merging and
surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and
gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that which for
human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death,
which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution,
any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry
wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any
general rule resting in agreement. But
in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test,
we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range.
The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our
development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to
them. But if we nevertheless hold out
and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing
ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden
from the most earnest earnestness of their existence – then a little progress
and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us;
that would be much.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
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