Startup Life: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

One of the long quotes that we intended to include in Startup Life:  Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur was this excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke letters to a 19 year old cadet in the Vienna  Military Academy written over a period from 1903 to 1908.  Even though the words were written more than a century ago, they are still powerful and timely.  This quote was located at the very end of Chapter Two:  Philosophy -- 

 

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, and therefore loving, for a long 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.

 And this quote was the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Five:  Personality -- 

“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”  Rainer Maria Rilke 

  

Enjoy! 

Comments

[Jim Bates]

WOW... thanks for the reminder.