letters to a young poet

when i was in the grand canyon, steve told me to read it. it took me a while. i'm reading it now. it comes as a sort of haunting reminder.

themes of isolation and solitude vs. community and intimacy seem to be overloading my brain lately. confused about attachment. confused, too, about human love, in general. confused, then, too, about what it means to be a christian.

here's a few, in a list of many, good things found in this book.
"the necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain. to be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings."

"and if it worries and torments you to think of your childhood and of the simplicity and quiet that goes with it, because you cannot believe any more in God, who appears everywhere in it, then ask yourself, whether you really have lost God? is if not rather, that you have never yet posessed him? for when should that have been? do you believe that a child can hold him, him who men bear only with effort and whose weight compresses the old? do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not think rather that whoever had him could only be lost by him?"

"and you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. this very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over white country. because people have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously in itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against opposition. we know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."

"to love is good, too: love being difficult. for one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."