双语对照 ● 爱是艰难的 Love Is Difficult
■ 爱是艰难的 Love Is Difficult
◎ Rainer Maria Rilke
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted[81] to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging[82] , 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[83] 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. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
这对爱来说是件好事：因为爱也是艰难的。因为让一个人去爱另一个人，这也许是上帝指派给我们的最重大、最艰巨的首要任务，是最后的考验和证明，别的工作只不过是为此而做的准备罢了。这就是为什么一切才刚刚开始的年轻人无法去爱。他们必须先学习什么是爱，用他们的整个生命，用他们的所有力量，用积聚了他们的孤独、焦虑和充满荣誉感的心去学习爱。然而，在这个长久且专注的学习过程中，爱会永远镌刻在你的生命里——在深深的寂寞里孤独地等待，只是为了那个所爱的人。爱的涵义不是倾心、献身以及与他人结合（对于一个懵懂的、涉世不深的、办事无条理的人来说，那会是怎样的一种结合呢）。爱是一种诱惑力，它吸引着人们去变得成熟，去完善自己，去成就世界，为了另一个人去充实自己；爱是一种伟大且艰巨的要求，是它选择了一个人，并呼唤着他走向远方。如此看来，年轻人必须把爱看作他们的工作（“日夜不分的敲打、锤炼”），希望他们能够善用那些赐予他们的爱。倾心、献身以及每一种结合都不是为他们而准备的（他们还需要很长很长时间的克制和积累）；因为那是爱的最高境界，是人类目前几乎无法达到的境界。
