When I was writing my recent blog Zionazis, about the formative experience I had which had led me to become a non-Zionist, I thought I’d google to find something to use as a quote, something about how difficult and yet how necessary it is to stand alone. Because that experience had made me feel profoundly alone.
I didn’t quite find what I was looking for but I did come across a quote from Rainer Marie Rilke on the necessity of being lonely if one is to be able to fully love. Rilke is generally considered to have been the greatest German-language poet of the first half of the twentieth century. He was not a prolific poet, he found that a protacted gestation period, often years, was necessary for his experiences to be assimilated and transmuted into poetry. For him both life and poetry were a slow process, to evolve at their own pace, meaningful in their depth, not breadth. The excerpt comes from a very famous collection known as Letters to a Young Poet which are exactly that, replies he’d written in 1903-4 to a series of letters to him from a young unknown poet. .
For myself, I’ve recently known loneliness in its darkest recesses imaginable, so dark I couldn’t even recount them here, at least not yet.. I’m not quite sure yet if it’s taught me to love more fully, I think so, time will tell. But I do know it’s helped me to be less afraid.
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The Seventh Letter,
April, 1904
Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.
To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people – who are beginners in everything – cannot yet love; they do not know how to love. They must learn it. With their whole being, with all strengths enveloping their lonely, disquieted heart, they must learn to love – even while their heartbeat is quickening. However, the process of learning always involves time set aside for solitude.Thus to love constantly and far into a lifespan is indeed aloneness, heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.
Love does not at first have anything to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being – for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity and lack of coherence? Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one´s horizon greatly.
