Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)

I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don't try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway because you would not be able to live them for everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually without noticing one day in the future, live into the answers.

Perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this that male and female freed from all false feelings and disinclinations do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors to become human together. Simply, seriously and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them.

We are only beginning now to consider the relationship between one person and another without bias or prejudice. Our attempts to live such a connection have no model. Yet in the flow of time, there are some things that will help us faint hearted beginners. The girl and the woman in their own fresh unfolding will only temporarily imitate masculine behavior, be it seen as bad or good, and assume masculine occupations. Once the inappropriateness of such a stage has revealed itself, it will be clear that women have only gone through a change of clothing in order to cleanse their own being of the influence of the other gender. Women who know a more immediate, fruitful and trustful relation to life must, after all, have become more humane than men who have not gone through the hardship of giving birth and who rash and arrogant undervalue what they mean to love. All this pulled down below the surface of life in pain and oppression, pulled out of humanity, the humanity of the woman who, when she will have rid herself of the conventions of limited femininity and the changes of her external circumstances, will be struck and surprised when she steps out in public one day. One day the girl and the woman who don't define themselves in masculine terms but as something in themselves, female humans, will require no other completion. This enormous shift will transform the character of love, which is hampered today by the resistance of men, and generate a relationship from human to human, not from man to woman. And this more human love, endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go, will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare, the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.

Don't let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult as it is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defend its defends itself in its own way and against all opposition straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary because solitude is difficult and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it. And then he says to love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another. That is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us. The utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.

Do you think that anyone who was, anyone who really has him, God, could lose it like a little stone? Don't you think that one who holds him, God, could only be lost by him. But if you realize that he was not in your childhood and not anywhere before, if you suspect,...But he says, why not think rather that he is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all eternity? The final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are. What stops you from projecting God's birth into times to come and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the story of an immense pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is ever again a new beginning? And couldn't it be his beginning? For to begin in itself is already so beautiful. If God is the fulfillment, must not what is lesser come before him so that he can emerge from fullness and overflow? Must he not come last in order to include everything in himself? And what meaning could we find if God for whom we yearn belongs to the past? And then that next sentence, as bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.