love 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 entrust-ed 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 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, up-ward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is solidute, 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 unclasrified, unfinished, and still incoherent), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself,to bdiesome world, to become world in himself for the sale of another person; it is a great, demanding claims on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to heartken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them (that 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. |