The most daring thing we have invented was to become human, and, with that, the creation of human values as life's most sublime adventure. - Lou Andreas-Salomé

As truly as I'd love a friend,
I always have loved you, riddling life,
whether I've laughed with you or wept,
whether you have brought me pleasure or strife.<p>Even in your sorrow I love you,
and, when you scatter me through space,
I will tear myself out of your arms
as a friend from a dear friend's embrace.<p>With all my strength I cling to you!
Let all your fire enkindle me.
Even in the heat of battle,
let me unravel your mysteries.<p>Thousands of years to live and think!
In your arms I long to remain.
And, when you have no more joy to give --
very well -- you still have your pain.

"Do you know what love is? I mean the most profound thing about it? I will tell you: it is the mystery of completely sharing the experience of what is happening to the other person. As if hypnotized, as if replaced or exchanged with that other person, you follow the most subtle stirrings of that other person's soul, enjoying them, experiencing them, in that person. For that reason, they call love a kind of insanity or possession by the other. What is the result? The result is that both persons experience the same thing -- that they become identical, so to speak." ("Maidens' Roundelay") p. 50

[On receiving the newly completed Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Duino Elegies] Ah слава Богу [Russian for thank God] dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you -- and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy, and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that plagued you; it has been on your lips for such long years; a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy [the Eighth]! -- It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so sayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed by things of mute presence that are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. (p. 332-33)