Love Is Difficult

勒内·马利亚·里尔克 / Rainer Maria Rilke

勒内·马利亚·里尔克（1875—1926），奥地利诗人。大学攻读哲学、艺术与文学史。里尔克的诗歌尽管充满孤独痛苦情绪和悲观虚无思想，但艺术造诣很高。本篇节选自他的书信集《给一位青年诗人的十封信》。

Ace in the Hole

Understand these new words before you listen to this article.

1. entrust [in\'trʌst] v. 委托，信托

2. solitude [\'sɔlitju:d] n. 孤独；隐居

3. inducement [in\'dju:smənt] n. 诱因

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 beginner sin 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 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.