RAINER MARIA RILKE

chooses him out and summons him to a distant goal. Only in
this sense, as a task to work upon themselves (““to hearken and to
hammer day and night”’) might young people use the love that
is given them. The self-losing and the surrender and all manner
of communion is not for them (they must save and treasure
for a long, long while yet), it is the ultimate thing, it is perhaps
something for which human lives are so far hardly adequate.
But that is where young people so often and so grievously
go wrong : that they (whose nature it is to have no patience)
throw themselves at each other when love comes over them,
scatter themselves abroad, just as they are in all their untidiness,
disorder and confusion . . .: But what is to be done then : How
is life to act upon this heap of half crushed matter which they
call their communion and which they would dearly like to style
their happiness, if that were possible, and their future 2 So each

“one loses himself for the other’s sake, a}d loses the other and

many others who wanted still to come. (And loses the expanses
and possibilities, exchanges the drawing near and fleeting away
of gentle, presageful things for a sterile helplessness out of which
nothing more can come ; nothing but a little disgust, disillusion
and poverty and deliverance into one of the many conventions
which are set up in large numbers as public refuges along this
most dangerous of roads. No region of human experience is so
well supplied with convéntions as this; life-belts of the most
varied invention, boats and swimming-bladders are there;
social perception has contrived to create shelters of every
description, for as it was disposed to take love-life as a pleasure,
it had to mould it into something easy, cheap, innocuous and
safe, as public pleasures are.

Many young people, to be sure, who love falsely, that is
simply surrendering, letting solitude go (the average person will
always persist in that way), feel the oppression of failure and
want to make the situation in which they find themselves full
of vitality and fruitful in their own personal fashion—; for their
nature tells them that even less than anything else of importance

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