Love

1.  love \ˈləv\ n  1 a (1) : strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties <maternal love for a child> (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests

2. 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. 

3. “And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice, will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.” (einstein’s dreams)

4. 

5. He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding.

6. When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.

7. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind

8.   But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. 

9. Rilke talks about the importance of loving books and the knowledge they give to you. “People love” has a great potential to disappoint and hurt you if you open your mind to it, but when it comes to love of knowledge, this isn’t the case. Learn to live by the books that you love.

10. Loving is a series of discoveries: it starts, significantly, with a Realization: that moment when you know that you’re in love. If writing were as exciting as falling in love, I’d get a lot more written, but most of my Realizations come as pinpoints of light while staring at the dismal tundra of an empty page.

11. There are people who are so focused on the external things in life, such as romantic love, that they ignore the internal aspect of their lives that they should be thinking about as well. There are also people who are very much the opposite, but the first is more common, and probably worse in the end. As children, our solitude contributes to a lot of out true personalities developing. Development unaffected and unhindered by anyone or anything. The same goes for the romantic love so many people seek—to find yourself first in solitude is essential to have the external love so many people search for.

12. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed in princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

13. Parents often say that the reasons for their actions are because “it’s more convenient.” For practicality it makes sense, but this “easy way out” that Rilke talks about is something more complex. Love, for example. He said that young people are not good at it until they learn it, as if it’s a skill. The “easy” route would be to not even attempt to learn love. The difficult way would obviously be making love work for you. It requires humans to do the exact opposite of what they want in the end: to be alone.

14. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like and inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

15. The importance of being able to wait is a major life skill. Everyone has a purpose, and if we are constantly wondering and trying to control our futures—whether it is a career, a relationship, a location—we tend to lose sight of the importance of patience.

16. Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds thing together, and strife separates them.

17. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

18. If you know for sure that you are meant to love and be loved, I think you have to build up your life around this desire. Rilke said the same thing about the need to write that some people have. I can’t relate with having the intense need to write that he was describing, but I can fill in the blank—“I must __________”—with other things, so that I can understand the passion he is describing.

19. “We'll be washed and buried one day my girl
And the time we were given will be left for the world
The flesh that lived and loved will be eaten by plague
So let the memories be good for those who stay”

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1. “love.” Webster’s New collegiate Dictionary. 1977. Print.

2. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters To A Young Poet. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Print. (69-70).

3. Lightman, Alan. Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004. Print. (54-55)

4. cvcnow films. Youtube search.

5. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (37)

6. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Scholastics, 2005. Print.

7. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. (Act I, scene 1)

8. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (70-71)

9. Personal Reflection

10. Wiggins, Marianne. The Shadow Catcher. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. Print. (7).

11. Personal Reflection

12. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (92)

13. Personal Reflection

14. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (42-43)

15. Personal Reflection

16. Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Print. (60)

17. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (33)

18. Personal Reflection

19. “Winter Winds” by Mumford & Sons