It happens frequently that the kind of happiness such as that experienced by you in loving and being loved unleashes not only new forces in a young man but uncovers entirely different, deeper layers of his nature from which then the most uncanny findings erupt overwhelmingly: but our confusions have always been part of our riches, and where their violence scares us we are simply startled by the unfathomed possibilities and tensions of our strength—and this chaos, as soon as we gain some distance from it, immediately triggers within us the premonition of new orders and, if we can enlist our courage in such premonitions even just a bit, the curiosity and desire to achieve this unforeseeable future order! I have written “distance”; should there be anything like advice that I would be able to suggest to you, it would be the hunch that you need to search for that now, for distance. Distance: from the current consternation and from those new conditions and proliferations of your soul that you enjoyed back at the time of their occurrence but of which you have until now not at all truly taken possession. A short isolation and separation of a few weeks, a period of reflection, and a new focusing of your crowded and unbridled nature would offer the greatest probability of rescuing all of that which seems in the process of destroying itself in and through itself.

Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily repetition of error—and how many individuals that ultimately became bound to each other in a frozen fate could have secured for themselves, by means of a few small, pure separations, that rhythm through which the mysterious mobility of their hearts would have inexhaustibly persisted in the deep proximity of their interior world-space, through every alteration and change.

Marriage is difficult, and those who take it seriously are beginners who suffer and learn!

I am of the opinion that “marriage” as such does not deserve as much emphasis as it has accrued because of the conventional development of its nature. No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be “happy”—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy! (Meanwhile it actually isn’t all that important to be happy, neither as an individual nor as a married person.) In some regards, marriage simplifies the conditions of life, and such a union surely augments the strengths and determinations of two young people so that they jointly seem to reach further into the future than before. Only these are sensations by which one cannot live. Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness—a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow. The being-togetherof two human beings is an impossibility; where it nonetheless seems to be present it is a limitation, a mutual agreement that robs one or both parts of their fullest freedom and development. Yet once it is recognized that even among the closest people there remain infinite distances, a wonderful coexistence can develop once they succeed in loving the vastness between them that affords them the possibility of seeing each other in their full gestalt before a vast sky!

For this reason the following has to be the measure for one’s rejection or choice: whether one wishes to stand guard at another person’s solitude and whether one is inclined to position this same person at the gates of one’s own depth of whose existence he learns only through what issues forth from this great darkness, clad in festive garb.

There is no general response to your husband’s question as posed in your letter. Only the most personal solution for each individual case will make clear whether or not an individual does damage to himself by sacrificing something for someone else. Even the seeming renunciation of one’s own ideals out of one’s solicitude for another does not have to be a final renunciation but can become an opportunity. An individual who makes a strong effort on behalf of someone else in a great gesture of subjugation might yet encourage within the other person that which he neglects in himself. And for some it might even appear more beautiful and rewarding to come to bloom in a beloved or in a greatly conceived commonality rather than in their own being.

Ultimately, this is what constitutes the events and values in the world: that time and again one hears of someone who has said things that one had thought only obscurely and who has done things that one had expressed only at a fortuitous moment. Such things make you grow. This awareness of conduits and lines reaching from distant solitary figures to us and from us to god knows where and to whom, this I consider our best feeling: it leaves us alone and yet simultaneously patches us into a great communality where we take hold and have help and hope.

When two or three people get together they are still not linked in any way. They are like string puppets whose wires rest in separate hands. It is not until one hand guides them all that they are enveloped by a commonality that forces them either to bow or to punch each other. And a human being’s strengths are even there where his wires come to end in a hand that holds and governs them.

We are so rarely in a position to help. For this reason one must be absolutely focused wherever the faintest opportunity to do so arises.

To be able to help always also means to help oneself in some way!

In a world that attempts to dissolve divinity into a kind of anonymity, it had to happen that there developed a humanitarian misunderstanding that expects of human help what it cannot provide. And since divine kindness is so indescribably tied to divine firmness, an era that takes it upon itself to distribute kindness, thus preempting providence, unleashes at the same moment the most ancient stores of cruelty among men.

No book, just as no word of encouragement, may achieve anything decisive if the person who encounters it had not been prepared by something quite unintentional for a more profound reception and conception; if his hour of reflection and taking stock had not arrived in any case. In order to shift that hour into the center of his consciousness, one thing or another may then suffice: sometimes a book or an artistic object, sometimes a child’s gaze, the voice of another person or a bird, and even sometimes a sound made by the wind, a creaking of the floor, or, when people were still spending time in front of an open fireplace (which I have been able to do on occasion), a gaze into the transformations of the flames. All this and even far smaller, seemingly coincidental things can trigger and affirm one’s self-discovery or self-rediscovery. And at times even poets may be among those good occasions.

Our emotions cannot do anything but become greater through empathy. From empathy to imitation it is yet a different path— in a sense a backtracking. Empathy is directed toward the inside, whereas imitation leads back outside into visibility. As such, it is actually the immediate loss of that which can be claimed through the emotion of empathy. But in the direction toward the inside followed by empathy, of this I am sure, one cannot go too far. The further one ventures there, the more dependably one will tap into a previously unknown vein of one’s own feelings. I consider imitators mostly to be individuals who did not muster enough empathy and who instead turned around halfway and by tracing their own footprints reached the outside again. Any engagement with a work of art would be absolutely hopeless without an empathic response that would lead almost to one’s own annihilation but ultimately returns us to ourselves richer, stronger, and more capable of feeling.