mit-sein

It is good to rely upon others. For no one can bear this life alone' -Holderlin
• 'without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch.1]
• "...to take solitude seriously and whenever it occurs to experience it as something good. The fact that other people fail to alleviate it should not be attributed to their indifference and withholding but because we are truly infinitely alone, each one of us, and unreachable with very rare exceptions. We must learn to live with this fact. I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other's solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness." [Rilke]
• "...my loneliness first has to be firm and secure again like a forest where no one ever set foot and which has not fear of steps. It must lose all emphasis, exceptionality, and obligation. It must become routine, completely natural and quotidian." [Rilke]
• "To be alone is a veritable elixir that drives an illness completely to the surface. First it has to get bad, worse, the very worst-there is no going further in any language-but then all gets well." [Rilke]
• "...that everything that exceeds a pleasant and unchanging medium state will ultimately have to be received, endured, and mastered by an infinitely solitary (and almost singular) individual without any assistance from anyone else. The hour of dying during which this insight is wrested from everyone is nothing but one of our hours, and not an exception. Our being continually passes through and into transformations that might be of no lesser intensity than the new, near, and next states ushered in by death. And just as we must take leave of one another irrevocably at a specific instant during this most conspicuous of changes, strictly speaking we must surrender, let be and let go of each other with each passing moment.'...'the great pain that is thus expressed?...this terrible truth is probably at the same time our most productive and blissful truth....suddenly one can just make out, as if glimpsed through clear tears, the distant realization that even as a lover one needs to be alone."..."It is the realization that even this apparently most intimately shared thing called love can be fully developed and, as it were, perfected only when it is done alone, apart from others." [Rilke]
• A degree of solitude and resignation is necessary to begin with. Some people can't bear solitude, let alone the idea that the heavens are empty...I accept all of Rilke's implied challenges because of what he wrote about solitude, and the ways in which it must be welcomed rather than feared. [-Hitchens]
• "Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company." [Arendt, The Life of the Mind]
• One Must Learn to Love.- This happens to us in music; first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it;when we sense that we'd miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music; it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love...there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned. [-Nietzsche, Gay Science, 334]