The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.
These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who.
I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.
In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height.
People have tended to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.
Each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us.
All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.
Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and clam before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.
Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.
You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.
Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.
Weltinnenraum,” “world-inner-space”. It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being.
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. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Everything assigned to us is a challenge; nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.
You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.
Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say.
But your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need.
It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!
You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.
It is you; you are the light around these familiar intimate things.