Chapter 9 9. The Seventh Letter

My dear Mr. Kappus, It has been a long time since I received your last letter.Please don't be offended; first work, then interruptions of business, and finally minor illnesses always prevent me from writing to you, because I write to you in moments of good peace.I feel better now (and the harsh and changeable transitional period of early spring makes people feel very uncomfortable here), dear Mr. Kappus, I greet you and (this is what I want to do with all my heart) I know to answer you. You see, I have copied your sonnet, because I find it beautiful and concise, and produced in a very proper form.This is the best poem of yours that I have read.Now I am transcribing it to you again, because I think it is very meaningful and full of fresh experience, seeing my own work again under the pen of others.

You read this poem as if someone else had written it, but you are about to feel in the deepest part how much more yours. It is my pleasure to read this sonnet and your letter often; for both I thank you. In loneliness you don't want to wander, because there is some desire in you to get out of this loneliness. —and it is this wish which, if you use it calmly, eminently, like an instrument, will help you extend your loneliness far and wide.Ordinary people (with the aid of convention) take everything lightly, and in the lightest of eases; but it is evident that in nature everything grows, defends, and expresses itself in its own way, regardless of Survive no matter what, resist all opposing forces.We know very little; but we must commit ourselves to hardships is a belief that never leaves us.Living in solitude is good because loneliness is hard; just being hard makes us all the more reason to work for it.

Love, well; for love is hard.To love human beings: this is perhaps the hardest and most important thing that can be given to us, the final experiment and examination, the highest work for which all other work is but preparation. So the youth, where everything is beginning, cannot yet love; they have to learn.They must use their whole being, with all their strength, muster their lonely, miserable and upwardly agitated hearts to learn love.But the period of study is always a long period of concentration, and love penetrates deeply into life for a long time—solitude, an intensified and deepened solitary life, for the loved one.The essence of love is not admiration, devotion, and union with a second person (what kind of union should it be, if it is an unclear, fruitless, unimportant union?), it is a kind of union for the individual. The lofty motivation, to mature, to complete something within oneself, to complete a world, is to complete a world of oneself for another person, which is a huge and uncompromising requirement for him, choose him, and go to Guangyuan call.The youth are to use the love given to them only in the sense of working on it as a lesson ("to search day and night, to practice").As for devotion, devotion, and all combinations, they are not their business (they still have to save and gather for a long time), which is the final destination, and perhaps a state that human life can hardly reach at present.

But young people are often so wrong in this (for there is no patience in their nature), that if love comes to them, they throw their lives as they please, and even stifle, topple, and confuse:—but then what should i doCould this fragmented union (which they themselves call a union, and would rather call it a bliss) make life anything but?Can you get by?What about their future?During this period, everyone loses himself for others, and at the same time loses others, and loses many others who are still to come, and loses a lot of vastness and possibility; the slight approach and alienation of objects full of premonitions are replaced by a sunset. A poor situation can produce nothing; nothing but disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and when it is necessary to seek remedies in conventions, there are a large number of conventions that have already been prepared, like disaster shelters, on this dangerous roadside.In all kinds of human life, nothing is more adorned by traditional customs than love, which is to invent many lifebuoys, swimming bags, and ambulance boats to the extreme; , since it tends to regard the life of love also as an amusement, it must be rashly fashioned into an easy, smooth, and risk-free life, like all public amusements.

It is true that there are also many young people who love wrongly, that is, give freely, cannot be lonely (it usually ends up in this situation—), and they feel a kind of false oppression, which will make them in their own personal way. spheres become vigorous and fruitful;—for their nature tells them that the many problems of love are not as important as other matters of importance, which may be settled openly by agreement of one kind or another; Personal questions between people, which require a "just" personal answer which is fresh and special in each case - but, they have been thrown together, can no longer be distinguished, distinguished, no longer based on All that is theirs, how can they find a way out of this already buried depth of loneliness within themselves?

They acted out of the usual helpless situations, and if they tried with the best of intentions to evade the custom (such as marriage) that befell them, they fell into an unusual, but nonetheless Is lifeless in the web of custom-bound resolutions; for all around them is--custom; and out of a dim union brought together long ago, nothing but custom-bound actions are performed; such disorder Every relationship to which a coma tends has its custom, even the most unusual (called immoral in the common sense); yes, even "separation" is almost a custom. The first step is an impersonal and accidental decision, without force and without fruit.

Whoever looks seriously will feel that, as with the difficult "death", this difficult "love" has not yet been enlightened, has not yet been solved, and has no instructions and ways to be known; and is blinded and burdened for us. , Passing on, the two tasks that have not yet appeared, and there is no common and reliable law for us to explore.But to the extent that we only begin to practice living as individual individuals, these great things will meet in closer intimacy with the individual.The demands of the difficult work of love on our developmental process are infinitely great, and we as believers are not up to those demands.But if we persevere patiently, and carry love on our shoulders as a burden and as a study, and not lose ourselves in any game of frivolity and frivolity (many people hide behind the most serious seriousness of their existence, Afterwards)—then those who will come after us may feel a little improvement and relief; that's good enough.

But we are now supposed to observe, without prejudice, the relationship of a single person to another single person as it is; we try to live in this relationship, and we have no precedent before us.But there has been something in the changing times that can help us in our timid beginnings. Girls and women, in their recent self-development, are only momentarily imitators of male vices and traits, repeaters of male professions.After such a precarious process, the facts will tell us that women have only passed through the (often ridiculous) disguises of success and change in order to wash their own natures from the distorting influence of men.As for the real life is more directly, richer, and more intimate in women's bodies, fundamentally they should have become purer and more human beings than men; men have no fruit of the body, but live only under the surface of life , arrogant and impatient, belittle what they are going to love.If women in the future call this "just women"

In the transformation of their external life, the customs of women are shed, and then the "humanity" of women born out of pain and oppression The light of day is about to come, which men do not yet feel, and which will surprise and shock them then.One day (now in the Nordic countries there are definite proofs) a new girl arrives, and the so-called woman is not only regarded as the opposite of man, but has some independent meaning, so that we no longer think of it. "Supplement" and "Boundary", think only of life and survival - women's people. This progress will transform the current fallacious love life (against the will of outdated men), fundamentally change it, and form a relationship between people and people, not between men and women.And this more human love (which is infinitely careful and refined, well and clearly accomplished in union and release), it will be like the love we have laboriously prepared, which exists in cases where two Loneliness loves each other, distinguishes each other, and respects each other.

Also: don't think that the great love you had once in your childhood has been lost; can you say that there were no great good wishes that matured in your life then, and that you still draw from them now? nutrient? I believe that love stays powerfully in your memory because it was your first deep loneliness and the first inner work you did for your life. —I wish you all the best, dear Mr. Kappus! Yours: Rene Maria Rilke 1904, 5, 14; Rome sonnet There is a dark, troubled quiver in my life that neither sighs nor complains. The snowy flakes in my dreams are the prayers of my long silent day.

But the big question stuck in my path. I became small and desolate like walking by a lake, and I dare not measure the waves of the lake. A sorrow overtakes me, so melancholy Like a starlight now and then in the vastness of a dull summer night; So my hands stretched out to love, because I wanted to pray for that tone, I couldn't find it on my passionate lips... (France Kappus)