| To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human
being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in
everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole
being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid,
upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always
a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on
into life, is – solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who
loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and
uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified
and unfinished, still subordinate – ?), it is a high inducement to the
individual to ripen, to become something in himself for another's sake,
it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and
calls him to vast things.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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