By Rainer Maria Rilke
Date: 1 August 1999
What is love?
Love is good. Love is difficult. To love another is the most difficult of all our tasks and the last test, indeed the work for which everything else is only training. Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know well rounded love: They have to learn it with their whole being, with all their strength, gathered close around their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart. But learning-time usually means a long drawn-out time spent in seclusion. Therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is--loneliness, intensified and deepened. Love at first doesn't mean merging, giving over, and uniting with another How can there be a union if the heart is yet unclarified, unfinished, still learning? It is a strong motivator for the person to ripen, to become something in and of him or herself, just for the sake of someone else. It is a taxing claim upon that person. Something that singles him or her out and calls them to great things. Yesterdays belong to fools wasting time on their past sorrows, the future is for those fools waiting for their tomorrows.
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