I was given Rainer Maria Rilke’s book “Rilke On Love and Other Difficulties” in perhaps the most unconventional way. Someone who became a dear friend of mine mailed me this book while traveling across the U.S. before she had even met me. I sense that often the things we need the most come to us in strange and bizarre ways.
Despite my background in literature, I found I could spend years growing with and rereading Rilke, only to scrape the surface. There is so much depth and dimension in his work that it is hard to drift through it lightly — lessons on young love, marriage, life and death, saturated with sex. The translator of the novel, John J. L. Mood, writes in the introduction the most articulate description of Rilke and his work: “One of the amazing things about Rilke is that he started at the place where most of us at best manage finally to end up.” Rilke is an author whose work is deeply profound and striking. There is no shortage of study and skill required to appreciate such eloquence.
Rilke seems to have written the most moving of all chapters, “Rilke’s Letters On Love,” as a handbook to love. Not petty infatuation or lust – but how to really be in love, and how to stay in love. It should not be the immediate impulse to give oneself entirely to their other as a token of devotion or love. These notions and common actions among “young people” are faults found frequently. Rilke writes, “When two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling.” The young must build a foundation for their love. They must harvest and cultivate it into something worthy of their work. Their investment is as much in themselves as it is in each other, and when they both can understand and appreciate this natural space, the two will be more united. On the contrary, he gravely warns against “the greatest fault that can happen to human relationships: they become impatient,” the consequence of which is shattering. Rilke takes the passions of love and realizes them, objectively provoking truth in its most pure form.
All this is contained within thirteen pages of a single chapter. The composer of the novel continues with powerful poetry and further notes on Rilke’s exploration of life. In his poem “Magic” he writes, “Feel! and trust!” just as one must while stepping into his beautiful mind.
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