致一位青年詩人的信 Letters to a Young Poet(7)

May 14, 1904

My dear Mr. Kappus,

Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.

You see: I have copied out your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.

It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?

They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, how ever unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand, on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.

The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. - All good wishes to you, dear Mr. Kappus!

Yours,

Rainer Maria Rilke

親愛的開普斯先生：

收到您的信后已有許多時光過去了。請不要因此而反對我;首先是那些工作，其次是紛繁的干擾，還有我差極了的健康一次又一次阻撓我回信，因為我希望自己能夠在平靜而快樂的時候給您回信?，F(xiàn)在我感到好多了(雖然早春的挹郁、喜怒無常的過渡天氣讓人無法忍受)，再次地，我能向您問候并和您談論那些您信里提到的事情了，且盡我所能。您看：我抄了您的十四行詩，我發(fā)現(xiàn)它可愛、簡單，而且形式如此得體。就我讀過的您的作品來說，這是最好的一首?，F(xiàn)在我把這首詩抄給您，從別人抄錄的筆跡里重新溫習自己的作品是一種重要而且全新的經(jīng)驗。讀它，就好象您從來沒有讀過它，您會感到自己的內(nèi)在世界有多豐富。--讀這首十四行詩和您的來信，對我來說，常常是一種快樂;為此，謝謝您。

您不要被自己的孤獨所困惑，事實上您一直想要擺脫它。這個希望，如果您能夠冷靜而慎重地應用，會幫助您跳出孤獨到更廣闊的空間去。大多數(shù)人(在習俗的幫助下)將他們的孤獨轉(zhuǎn)向了舒適和安逸;但是很清楚，我們必須相信這很困難;每一個活著的人都相信它，每一樣自然里的東西都在成長、抵抗著自己，同時又試圖不惜任何代價成為它自己，同所有對立面作對。我們所知甚少，但是我們必須相信難的東西是必定不會放棄我們的;孤獨是好的，因為孤獨是難的;除了難之外一定還有別的更多的原因使我們?nèi)プ鏊?/p>

愛也是好的：因為愛是難的。因為，一個人去愛另一個人，或許是我們所承受的最困難的事情，是最終的任務、最終的考驗和信仰，為了這項工作，所有的其他一切都只是在做準備罷了。這就是那些正處于一切開端的年輕人還沒有能力愛的原因。而這正是他們應該學習的。用他們整個的生命，用他們所有的力量，匯集他們所有的孤獨、渴望、躍躍欲試的心，他們必須學習去愛。但是學習的時間總是漫長而孤獨的，因此愛在很長的時間內(nèi)，愛還沒有進入的生活里是--：孤獨，對愛著的人來說這是一種孤高而幽深的獨立地存在。開始的時候愛不意味著同另一個人結(jié)合、包容和聯(lián)為一體(如果兩個人各自都還是模糊的、未成熟的、無條理的，那將是怎樣的聯(lián)系呀)，對個體來說，為了另一個人而使自己成熟并變成自己，變成世界，變成自己的世界該是多么大的誘惑呀;對他來說那是偉大的必須的要求，有些東西在選擇他和呼喚他遠離。只有在這種感覺的時候，在那些任務自己做工的時候("去傾聽和捕捉日日夜夜的時候")，年輕的人們或許可以用那給予他們的愛。合并、包容和每一種聯(lián)合都不是為了他們(人們必須仍舊，花很長很長時間來積累和匯集它們);它是絕對的，或許是它使人的生命不能那樣強大。但是這是年輕人經(jīng)常犯的毀滅性的錯誤：當愛抓住他們的時候，他們(稟性沒有耐心的人)盡情作樂，他們分散著自己，就如他們的本來面目一樣，散成混亂的、無秩序的、野蠻的……然后什么發(fā)生了呢?生活能對它們怎么樣呢?對這些成堆的半碎的東西--他們把它叫做交流，或如可能的話，他們叫它快樂，還有未來?所以每個人都在為了別人的同時迷失著自己，并丟掉了別人，還有許多不斷要來的別人。丟失了莫大的距離和可能性，放棄了接近和逃離溫柔的、有先見之明的事物，而寧愿得到毫無結(jié)果的困惑，除此之外什么都不會來臨;除了一點厭惡、失望和貧窮，還有逃避眾多的諸如鋪在大多數(shù)危險的道路上的蓋子般的習俗。就人類的經(jīng)驗而言再也沒有一個習俗有這一個來得寬泛了;有各種發(fā)明，船和滑翔艇的保護者;社會能夠創(chuàng)造各種類型的避難所，因為它寧愿把愛的生活當作一種娛樂，它也不得不給它一種輕松的方式，廉價的、安全的、確定的，如同公眾娛樂一樣。沒錯，許多年輕人都錯誤地愛著，就是說，簡單地屈從了自己而放棄了的孤獨(普通人當然總是這樣--)，失敗感壓抑著他們，他們想使所處的情況變得更加生動和富有成果些，并更加私人化一些。天性告訴他們：愛的問題比其他任何問題都要重要得多，不能當眾或按這個那個協(xié)議來解決;他們是問題，從別人那兒來的親密問題，無論任何情形下都需要一種新的、特殊的、完全個人化的回答--。但是怎么能呢，如果人們已經(jīng)完全地投入進去并無法分清誰的是誰的，因此也不再擁有自己的任何東西，他們怎么能夠找到自己身外的那條路呢，怎么才能跳出已經(jīng)埋葬的深深的孤獨呢?

他們在無助的情況下行動著，然后，如果有最好的企圖，他們就試圖逃離接近他們的世俗(比如，婚姻)，他們掉進一些不明顯的機關(guān)里，但是和致命的世俗解決之道一樣可怕。因為然后所有圍繞他的東西都成了--世俗。無論人們是要用前衛(wèi)的融合、還是混亂的交流來行動，每一種行為都是世俗的：每一種關(guān)系都是困惑的，并導致進一步的世俗，但是通常(即在一般的非正常感知下)是這樣;甚至分居也是世俗的一步，一種非個人的、偶然的決定，沒有力量和成效。

那些嚴肅看待愛的人將發(fā)現(xiàn)無論是艱難的死亡還是艱難的愛都沒有任何凈化和解決的方式，任何一點可以察覺的線索;對二者來說，這些任務，我們將之包裹起來，原封不動地傳遞過去，在此沒有可以發(fā)現(xiàn)的固守不變的規(guī)律。但是當我們作為個人用同樣的方法來考驗生活的時候，這些偉大的東西將走過來和我們會合，獨自的、極其親密地會合。有種觀點認為，愛這項艱難的工作比生活更能促使我們發(fā)展。我們，作為初始者，和他們是不平等的。但是如果我們不斷地努力，象學徒一樣，而不是在整個輕松而輕佻的游戲中丟失自己--記住在這游戲背后人們已將人性這最神圣的東西藏了起來--那么小小的進步和一點點的閃光或許都能夠照亮那走近我們的東西。那已經(jīng)足夠了。

我們剛開始客觀地考慮一個人和另一個人的關(guān)系，不帶任何偏見，在這之前也沒有任何類似的關(guān)系可供模仿。而在這變化之中，不斷積累事物的時間已經(jīng)為我們帶來了許多東西，幫助我們度過這膽怯的實習期。女孩子和女人，在她們嶄新的、個人的花季里，將只是男性正確或錯誤行為的模仿者和男性職業(yè)的重復者，度過這段不確定的過渡期后，很明顯，女人將沖出那些大量和變異的偽裝(常常是荒唐的)，然后她們能夠凈化自己真正的天性，洗滌另一性帶給她們的變形的影響。女人，因其生活更加舉棋不定，更加富有成果，更加自信，所以必須比那些輕松、悠閑的男人更加成熟和更加具有人性，而那些男人，從不深入生活的內(nèi)部，認真看待身體的收獲，他們傲慢、匆忙、自以為是地認為自己在愛著。女人的人性，帶著其子宮所忍受的痛苦和恥辱，將在外部世界的改革中剝?nèi)ゼs束女人的習俗之后呈現(xiàn)出來，而那些從沒有感覺到這些的男人將為之震驚。終有一天(甚至現(xiàn)在，特別是在北歐的國家，可信賴的嘆息已經(jīng)在閃出萌芽之光)，終有一天女孩子們和女人們的名字將不再意味著僅是男性的對立面，將有一些什么在其自身里邊存在，那些讓人認為不再是任何補充和限制的東西，而是生活和現(xiàn)實：女性的人類。這個進步(首先遭到了落后的男性的極端反對)將轉(zhuǎn)變愛的經(jīng)驗，而這經(jīng)驗里充滿了錯誤，它將被徹底改變并重塑成一種意味著平等的人類關(guān)系，而不再是從男人流向女人的愛。而這種更加人性化的愛(將隨著無限的深思熟慮和溫柔，還有束縛和解放之后的善良和清明得到完善)將類似我們今天痛苦地準備著的，有一番偉大的斗爭：這愛包括：兩個孤獨的人互相保護、界野分明并向彼此問候。

還有，不要認為愛是想當然的，當您還是個男孩子的時候，您已經(jīng)丟失了它;您怎么就知道那時那巨大而慷慨的愛不曾落實到您身上，您依此而生存至今呢?我相信那愛仍舊在那兒，它在您的記憶里是那么強烈而熱情，因為它是您第一次深深的孤獨和第一次內(nèi)在世界作用于您的生命。--用我所有的美好希望祝福您，親愛的開普斯先生!

您的，

瑞那.瑪里亞.李爾克

羅馬1904年5月14日