Rilke’S Letters On Love
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!
Why are we not set in the midst of what is most mysteriously ours? How we have to creep round about it and get into it in the end; like burglars and thieves, we get into our own beautiful sex, in which we lose our way and knock ourselves and
stumble and finally rush out of it again, like men caught transgressing, into the twilight of Christianity.
Why have they made our sex homeless, instead of making it the place for the festival of our competency?
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.…
then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude.
A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development.
a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
At bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone.
All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.
But just think, can that be anything beautiful, to give oneself away not as something whole and ordered, but haphazard rather, bit by bit, as it comes?
But young people who love each other fling themselves to each other in the impatience and haste of their passion, and they don’t notice at all what a lack of mutual esteem lies in this disordered giving of themselves;
There are such relationships which must be a very great, almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly ordered and composed; they can unite only two wide, deep, individual worlds.—
So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something! For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.
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 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 young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose 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, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that wanted still to come.
And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.
Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law.
We are only just now beginning to look upon the relation of one individual person to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such associations have no model before them.
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more confidently, must surely have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than easygoing man, who is not pulled down below the surface of life by the weight of any fruit of his body, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves.
INTRODUCTION I have said that there is perhaps no great poet whose work is more sensual than that of Rilke, that the great spirituality of his work is forever and always rooted in the senses.
And Rilke’s constant concern with death is another example, for what is more sensual and earthly than death?
THE LOVERS See how in their veins all becomes spirit: into each other they mature and grow. Like axles, their forms tremblingly orbit, round which it whirls, bewitching and aglow. Thirsters, and they receive drink, watchers, and see: they receive sight. Let them into one another sink so as to endure each other outright. Summer, 1908
His poetry was refined into a mature work in the double fire of disciplined technique under Rodin (New Poems) and cathartic psychological exploration (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).
The Dragon-Princess
While still only in his twenties, Rilke penned what is for me the most affirmative passage of nonfiction prose I have ever come across.
Unambiguous affirmation is sentimentality. Rilke says “Perhaps.” We heard him say earlier, “Perhaps man will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Likewise, here again he says “Perhaps”—and in doing so speaks a word for us all.
“To confirm confidence toward death out of the deepest delights and glories of life: to make death, who never was a stranger, more distinct and palpable again as the silent knowing participant in everything alive.”