How To Break Up With Integrity - Rilke On Unwounding Separation and The Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships - Brain Pickings

09.09.
2020 How to Break Up with Integrity: Rilke on Unwounding Separation and the Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships – Brain Picki…
How to Break Up with Integrity:

Rilke on Unwounding Separation
and the Difficult Art of
Recalibrating Broken
Relationships
“Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily
repetition of error.”
BY M A R I A P O P OVA
We speak of love as a gift, but although it may come at first

unbidden, as what Percy Shelley called a “speechless swoon of
joy,” true intimacy between two people is a difficult achievement
— a hard-earned glory with stakes so high that the prospect of
collapse is absolutely devastating. When collapse does happen —
when intimacy is severed by some disorienting swirl of chance
and choice — the measure of a love is whether and to what
extent the kernel of connection can be salvaged as the shell
cracks, how willing each partner is to remain openhearted while
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09.09.2020 How to Break Up with Integrity: Rilke on Unwounding Separation and the Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships – Brain Picki…
brokenhearted, how much mutual

care and kindness the two who
have loved each other can extend
in the almost superhuman
endeavor of redeeming closeness
after separation.
How to do this with maximal

integrity, in a way that embodies
Adrienne Rich’s definition of
honorable human relationships,
is what the poet Rainer Maria
Rilke (December 4, 1875–
December 29, 1926) explores in one of his staggeringly insightful
letters, included in the posthumous collection Letters on Life
(public library), edited and translated from German by Ulrich
Baer.
1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by

Helmuth Westhoff, Rilke’s brother-in-law
The day after Christmas 1921, nearly two decades after he

asserted that “for one human being to love another… is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other
work is but preparation,” and four years after the poet Edna St.
Vincent Millay modeled the art of the kind, clean breakup, Rilke
writes in a letter to the German painter Reinhold Rudolf
Junghanns — a close friend struggling through separation and
aching with the loss of love:
As soon as two people have resolved to give up their

togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or
particularity is already so completely part of the life of each
individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to
become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the
agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain,
and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs
separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an
essential condition of what the now solitary and most
lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his
reclaimed life.
He considers the measure of a “good breakup” — a separation

that, however painful in its immediate loss, is a long-term gain
for both partners, individually and together:
If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during

their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges
of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it
cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and
changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in
a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration
remained available to them, then their decision to separate

cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.
Drawings by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns
Four weeks later, as Junghanns continues to struggle with letting

go of his lover, Rilke admonishes against the painful elasticity of
on-again/off-again relationships, in which the short-term
alleviation of longing and loss comes at the price of ongoing
mutual wounding:
When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already

belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish
to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually
become soft toward each other, causing helpless and
unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-
upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an
important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is
to be achieved on both sides.
Rilke emphasizes the importance of an initial period of distance

in order to properly recalibrate a romantic relationship into a real
friendship — a period which requires a tremendous leap of faith
toward an uncertain but possibly immensely rewarding new

mode of connection:
People in your situation might have to communicate as

friends. But then these two separated lives should remain
without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist
as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This
is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new
requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact
(which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has
to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction.
Etching by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns
That autumn, Rilke counsels another brokenhearted friend —

this time a woman — through a similar predicament. Noting that
“our confusions have always been part of our riches,” he
reiterates that whatever the pull toward reunion may be, it is
crucial to take distance in order to gain a clearer perspective on
saving what is worth saving of the relationship. In a mirror-
image complement to his wisdom on challenging necessity of
giving space in love, he insists on the difficult, necessary art of
taking space after love:
I have written “distance”; should there be anything like

advice that I would be able to suggest to you, it would be the
hunch that you need to search for that now, for distance.
Distance: from the current consternation and from those
new conditions and proliferations of your soul that you
enjoyed back at the time of their occurrence but of which
you have until now not at all truly taken possession. A short
isolation and separation of a few weeks, a period of
reflection, and a new focusing of your crowded and
unbridled nature would offer the greatest probability of
rescuing all of that which seems in the process of
destroying itself in and through itself.
Rilke cautions against the temptation to turn a willfully blind eye

toward all the factors that have rendered the romantic
relationship unfeasible and to reunite — a choice that, rather
than healing, only retraumataizes and perpetuates the cycle of
mutual disappointment:
Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily

repetition of error — and how many individuals that
ultimately became bound to each other in a frozen fate
could have secured for themselves, by means of a few small,
pure separations, that rhythm through which the
mysterious mobility of their hearts would have
inexhaustibly persisted in the deep proximity of their
interior world-space, through every alteration and change.
There is a symmetry, both sad and beautiful, between Rilke’s faith

in the redemptive power of distance in saving love after a
breakup and his insistence that “the highest task of a bond

between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the
solitude of the other” — as within romance, so beyond romance.
Complement this particular portion of the immeasurably wise

and consolatory Letters on Life with Epictetus on love and loss
and Adam Phillips on why frustration is necessary for
satisfaction in love, then revisit Rilke on what it really means to
love, the combinatorial nature of inspiration, the lonely patience
of creative work, what it takes to be an artist, and how hardship
enlarges us.
—
Published September 26, 2018
—
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/09/26/rilke-breakup/
—
www.brainpickings.org

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09.09.

How to Break Up with Integrity:

We speak of love as a gift, but although it may come at first

brokenhearted, how much mutual

How to do this with maximal

1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by

The day after Christmas 1921, nearly two decades after he

As soon as two people have resolved to give up their

He considers the measure of a “good breakup” — a separation

If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during

remained available to them, then their decision to separate

Drawings by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns

Four weeks later, as Junghanns continues to struggle with letting

When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already

Rilke emphasizes the importance of an initial period of distance

toward an uncertain but possibly immensely rewarding new

People in your situation might have to communicate as

Etching by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns

That autumn, Rilke counsels another brokenhearted friend —

I have written “distance”; should there be anything like

Rilke cautions against the temptation to turn a willfully blind eye

Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily

There is a symmetry, both sad and beautiful, between Rilke’s faith

breakup and his insistence that “the highest task of a bond

Complement this particular portion of the immeasurably wise

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