Letter Seven
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed since I received your last letter.
Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of
interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from
answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy
days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody,
bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with
real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I
can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found
that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet
decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am
giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new
experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting.
Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your
innermost being how very much it is your own.
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your
letter, often; I thank you for both.
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. This
very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you
spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help
of conventions) 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; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and
defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself
at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust
in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to
be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one
more reason for us to do it.
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, the ultimate task, the final test and
proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. 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. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on
into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the
person who loves. 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. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves
("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the
love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of
communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and
gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives
are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and 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
what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things
that they call their communion and that they would like to call their
happiness, if that were possible, and their future? 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. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, 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 great numbers like public shelters on this
most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided
with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied
invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of
very 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.
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e.,
simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person
will of course always go on doing that - ), feel oppressed by their failure and
want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their
own, personal way -. For their nature tells them that the questions of love,
even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly
and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate
questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new,
special, wholly personal answer -. But how can they, who have already flung
themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus
no longer possess anything of their won, 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, whit the
best of intentions, they try to escape the conventions that is approaching them
(marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but
just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is -
convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion,
every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has
its own convention, however unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it
may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental
decision without strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death,
which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution,
any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry
wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule
that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life
as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with
greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our
development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them.
But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and
apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous
game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their
being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to
those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of
one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our
attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the
changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help
our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding,
will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and
repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it
will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation
of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own
essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women,
in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more
confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than
light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the
weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he
thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her
suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the
conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status,
and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it.
Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe,
trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be
girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male,
but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement
and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
This advance (at first very much against the will of the
outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with
error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship
that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that
flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself
with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding
and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great
struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border
and greet each other.
And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which
was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know
whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes
by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong
and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the
first inner work that you did on your life. - All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke