Rilkean beginnings, or, loving the questions

I should begin with Rilke. As well as his poetry, his Letters to a Young Poet are well worth reading. The 'young poet' was Franz Xaver Kappus, a military cadet with poetic leanings. Kappus sought advice from Rilke, about poetry, about the choice of poet as a career—and about love. The turbulent nature of Rilke's own relationships might suggest that he was not the ideal advisor on the subject of love; reading his poems and letters soon dispels such suspicions.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Love, according to Rilke, is 'hard':

The fondness of one person for another—it may be that this is the most difficult task that we are set, the most extreme, the ultimate trial and proof, and the task for which all other tasks were no more than a preparation. (Letter VII)

For this reason, he writes, the young are not 'capable' of love; they are still, like apprentices, to learn how to love. The characteristic of young lovers—their most grievous mistake—is to 'hurl themselves at each other when love overcomes them and scatter themselves abroad in whatever state they may be—in all their prodigality, confusion, madness'. In doing so, 'each is lost for the other's sake, and loses the other'; what will come of it is ultimately 'aversion, disappointment and deprivation'.

Far from seeing the essence of love as the union of two people, Rilke emphasizes the importance of retaining the individual self in love. There is a logic to this that escapes some of the most common presentations of love. To fall in love is to fall in love with the other person—ideally we love that person for who they are, just as they love us for who we are. To become a union with that person is to change and to lose two selves, precisely the two selves who loved each other in the first place. Love, in Rilke's view,

is a high occasion for the individual spirit to ripen and to develop into something in itself, to become a world, to become a world in one's own self for someone else's sake: it is a great, immoderate demand upon the self, choosing and summoning it to far-distant places. (Letter VII)

Perhaps that (youthful) quest after union is really a search for answers to the troubling questions that love inevitably arouses. For Rilke, the young should abandon this pursuit of answers, as he urges Kappus:

You are still so young, so uncommitted, and I do entreat you as strongly as I can, my dear Sir, to stay patient with all that is still unresolved in your own heart, to try to love the very questions, just as if they were locked-up rooms or as if they were books in an utterly unknown language. You ought not yet to be searching for answers, for you could not yet live them. What matters is to live everything. For just now, live the questions. Maybe you will little by little, almost without noticing, one distant day live your way into the answers. (Letter IV)

To love and live the questions, and by doing so, to live one's way to the answers: this could be the basis for a philosophy of life. It resembles the idea of mindfulness—to live attentively in the present. It resembles too the philosophy of Socrates and its seemingly interminable questioning without ever fixing on an answer.

I have taught many students over the years and most of them are eager to rush towards answers, in life as well as their studies. They regard this time in their lives as the acquisition of answers. Rilke reminds us that first it is necessary to live and explore the questions—and that this is a long and difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process.