The Young

So I'm currently writing a paper and thought I'd take a break from writing to well...uh....write, since I haven't written a blog in a while. To long, TOO LONG! I usually have the best ideas about things to write about when I'm either taking a shower or getting ready. These are the two times throughout my day that I do the best thinking. There's nothing like putting on sparkly eye shadow that gets the blood in your brain flowing, I'd say.

Well I really have nothing much to say... oh except I just thought of something... Last week I read some of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet over again. Letter 7 has some truly amazing things to say about relationships. I'll give you some quotes:

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.


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. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road.

Ok I know that was a long quote, but really that doesn't even give the letter justice. You have to read the beautiful thing in it's entirety. These letters are a series of amazing advice about art and life, and I was thrilled to read this one because I felt like Rilke was getting at what I'd been trying to do all my life. I never wanted to get into a relationship in high school because relationships always felt immature to me...I felt immature. Even when I was with a guy I thought would be perfect for me, it never felt right. I always had this desire for freedom which I thought a relationship would rob me of, and without that freedom I wouldn't be able to properly develop as a strong individual. I'm about to turn 21 in two weeks, and at this point in my life I've often questioned if my decision to distant myself from most romantic relationships has be a good one, but after reading something written by a genius like Rilke that supports my decision, I feel confident in the path I've chosen. The poet that Rilke is writing to is about 19 and Rilke was about 27, so the two are right around my age and when Rilke goes on to say:

We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them.

this "we" he is talking about includes me. I am also at a time in my life where I'm now beginning to view this relation objectively, and I'm so happy to be here. I'm at the age where everyone around me is starting to talk about weddings. While most of my girlfriends are planning out what style dress they would like to wear at their weddings or what time of year they would want the ceremony, all I know is that I would love to read some of Rilke's words at my ceremony. Ah, now to only find another solitude so we can, "protect and border and greet each other."