Apprenticeship

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it… if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over great distance. Most people have… turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult… (it) is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult… 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… 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… 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… But this what young people are so often an so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment… And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come… gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in the great numbers like public shelters on this dangerous road… society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are… they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
They act out of mutual helplessness and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution… even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit… But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as a burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game… then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.”

Letter 7
Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
By Rainer Maria Rilke