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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. 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 learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is solitude: a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves.

With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn.

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. It is also good to love because love is difficult. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. …ou should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.