Rainer Maria Rilke: lessons on love

Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When I was a young lad he was one of my idols: I wished that one day I might be able to perceive life and love as he did or, perhaps more precisely, to express them with his strength and sensitivity.

Today he is more relevant than ever. In our age, where everything is a commodity and has been commodified, where "entertainment" has replaced every form of authentic pleasure and where Love has been replaced by a fleeting sensation, bought and sold like any other commodity, his words and verses offer a teaching that has never been more timely:

To take Love seriously, to learn it like a job: this, Friedrich, is what young people need. People have misunderstood, like so many other things, the place of Love in life: they have turned it into a game and a pastime, because they see in games and pastimes a greater happiness than in work; but there is no greater happiness than work, and Love, precisely because it is the ultimate happiness, can be nothing other than work."

This very short text contains everything, but I allow myself to go further. Authentic life, as I understand it, knows no barriers, divisions or categories. It is a flow that, along its course, takes on different shades, which the ignorant interpret as separate compartments (work, pleasure, free time, love, and so on) and so they torment themselves in the pointless effort of seeking one thing in order to avoid another.

m.m.