We are going to a wedding tomorrow (actually, it is a "pagan hand-fasting"), and the couple plans to read this passage. I was writing to someone about friendship when I saw this, and it seemed to me that it applies in some sense even to friends (although I'm not sure about the "gathering honey" part...).
Passage adapted from "Letters to a Young Poet"
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and caress and salute each other.
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.
The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development.
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, 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 before an immense sky.
When we love, we must not forget that we are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love -- we must learn love, and that (like all learning) takes calm, patience, and composure.
To take love seriously and to bear it and to learn it like a task, this it is what young people need. Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: they must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work, must become something.
For the more we are, the richer is everything that we experience. And whoever wants to have a deep love must collect and save for it and gather honey.
Passage adapted from "Letters to a Young Poet"
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and caress and salute each other.
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.
The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development.
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, 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 before an immense sky.
When we love, we must not forget that we are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love -- we must learn love, and that (like all learning) takes calm, patience, and composure.
To take love seriously and to bear it and to learn it like a task, this it is what young people need. Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish: they must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must work, must become something.
For the more we are, the richer is everything that we experience. And whoever wants to have a deep love must collect and save for it and gather honey.
posted by R @ 5:10 PM
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