Love Is Difficult
It is good to love, but love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most dificult 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 beginingers 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 ahead and far on into life, is solitude, a heightented and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering or uniting with another person ( what would a union be for two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?); it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is great, demaning claimon him, something that chooses him and calls himto 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 Communicali 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 as yet barely large enough.