On Unrequited Love by Rainer Maria Rilke
On Unrequited Love
by Rainer Maria Rilke
I have never understood how a genuine, elementary and thoroughly true love can remain unrequited since such a love is nothing but the urgent, blessed appeal for another person to be beautiful, abundant, great, intense, unforgettable: nothing but the surging commitment for him to amount to something. And tell me who is in the position to refuse this appeal when it is directed at him, when it elects him from among millions where he might have lived, obscured by his fate or unattainable in the midst of fame... No one can seize, take and contain within himself such love: it is so absolutely intended to be passed onward beyond the individual and needs the beloved only for the ultimate charge that will propel its future orbiting among the stars.
Rilke would have written it inside a longer letter to one of his many correspondents on love, in this case, Lou Andreas-Salomé. Lou (1861–1937) was Rilke's most important intellectual companion across his entire adult life — fifteen years his senior, formerly close to Nietzsche, eventually a serious psychoanalyst trained by Freud, and the woman who taught the young Rilke to read Russian, took him to Russia twice, and remained his confidante until his death. Rilke was, by all accounts, a bit of a disaster in his personal life, which is probably why he’s so able to articulate why love is so difficult. He was complicated and often disappointing, and was incredible at epistolary intimacy and then retreat from the face of actual cohabitation. That said, he can still articulate brilliantly while failing to live it. I think the real challenge is doing both, of course.
Rilke, On Unrequited Love. This passage is from Letters on Life: New Prose Translations, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005), or possibly from the older Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892-1910 and Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1926 (W.W. Norton, two volumes, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, 1945–1948).
This goes with a substack post belonging to Christine Marie Mason on Unrequited Love, which I have long loved, because the ability to distance make the object of love more universal is I think part of the challenge of being human.
