2005-12-23 - 5:42 AM

you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it...........

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 ......

we know little , but that we must hold to what is difficult is 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.

To love is good, too; love being difficult. For one human being to love 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 a 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, secluded time and so loving , for a long while ahead and far on 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 something in himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things

but young people err so often and so grievously in this that they (in who's nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other , when love takes possession of them , scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion, and then what....

what is life to do to this heap of half battered existence which they call their communion and which they would gladly call their happiness, each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other

how should they who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other. who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves , out of the depth of their already shattered solitude.

love is meant to be of one human being to another , no longer of man to woman. and this more human love infinitely considerate and gentle and kind and clear in binding and releasing will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil
the love that consists in this...

that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.

these thoughts that i agree with are not my own..
but taken from Rainer Maria Rilke in letters to a young poet. 1907

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