A venomous suicide
note of a young actress got published in newspapers a few days back, about a
week after her death. The letter accused her boy-friend (another aspiring young
actor) for being the person responsible for her decision to take her life. A letter, strong enough to destroy the boy and
his career! The message of the letter was clear – “I am leaving this world. So
my dear love, I am taking you and your career with me”. The boy has been called
a rapist and a murderer and has been put to jail for questioning and trial. The
letter has created waves in social media and the female chauvinist society took
up this incident as an opportunity to teach men how they should behave in a
relationship and women on how they should act if a relationship is going wrong.
I don’t want to judge or to comment on the scenario that
could have made the girl take up the decision to suicide. If someone decides to
experience death, it is their very personal choice. No one has the right to
comment on that. But the matter worth discussing about a ‘decision to suicide
because of a relationship gone bad’ is the way the young generation perceives
love and relationships.
The below piece is taken from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
