Rilke on the difficult art of giving space in love and the secret to a good marriage, an illustrated antidote to our existential homelessness and more

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the [brainpickings.org]( weekly digest by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Epictetus on love, loss, and the Stoic cure for heartbreak, Neruda's beautiful and humanistic Nobel Prize speech, an Indian illustrated ode to water — you can catch up [right here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage]( [rilkeonloveandotherdifficulties.jpg?fit=320%2C479]( “Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls,” the great Lebanese-American poet, philosopher, and painter counseled in what remains [the finest advice on the secret to a loving and lasting relationship](. Our paradoxical longing for intimacy and independence is a diamagnetic force — it pulls us toward togetherness and simultaneously repels us from it with a mighty magnet that, if unskillfully handled, can rupture a relationship and break a heart. Under this unforgiving magnetism, it becomes an act of superhuman strength and self-transcendence to give space to the other when all one wants is closeness. And yet this difficult act may be the very thing — perhaps the only thing — that saves the relationship over and over. Two decades before Gibran, at the dawn of the twentieth century, another great poet of abiding insight into the turbulences of the human heart contemplated this predicament. In a letter to the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) offered some spectacular advice on managing the bipolar pull of autonomy and togetherness in a way that assures the longevity of any close bond and protects love from self-destruction. The passages, originally published in Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet — the record of his six-year correspondence with Kappus, which also gave us Rilke’s timeless wisdom on [the lonely patience of creative work]( [what it takes to be an artist]( [why we read]( and [how hardship enlarges us]( — appear in the wonderful poetry and prose anthology [Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations]( ([public library]( selected and translated by the scholar and philosopher John Mood. [rilke4.jpg?w=680] 1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by Helmuth Westhoff, Rilke’s brother-in-law Rilke writes to his young correspondent: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation. A century before psychologist Esther Perel asserted in her [landmark book on the central paradox of relationships]( that “love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy” because “our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness,” Rilke considers how our cultural constructs around what it means to be coupled obstruct happiness in union: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky! Therefore this too must be the standard for rejection or choice: whether one is willing to stand guard over the solitude of a person and whether one is inclined to set this same person at the gate of one’s own solitude, of which he learns only through that which steps, festively clothed, out of the great darkness. [abzlove19.jpg] Illustration from [An ABZ of Love]( Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality This principle, Rilke points out, holds true not only in marriage but in any close relationship and any bond desired to last a lifetime: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to come close to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling… Once there is disunity between them, the confusion grows with every day; neither of the two has anything unbroken, pure, and unspoiled about him any longer… They who wanted to do each other good are now handling one another in an imperious and intolerant manner, and in the struggle somehow to get out of their untenable and unbearable state of confusion, they commit the greatest fault that can happen to human relationships: they become impatient. They hurry to a conclusion; to come, as they believe, to a final decision, they try once and for all to establish their relationship, whose surprising changes have frightened them, in order to remain the same now and forever (as they say). Two millennia after Epictetus offered [the Stoic cure for heartbreak]( in the recognition of the temporality and flux of all things, Rilke adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Self-transformation is precisely what life is, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling from minute to minute, and lovers are those in whose relationship and contact no one moment resembles another. The outliers impervious to this supreme challenge of love are rare, Rilke notes; for the rest of us, there is only the hard, necessary work of love: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]There are such relationships which must be a very great, almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly ordered and composed; they can unite only two wide, deep, individual worlds. […] For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Complement this particular portion of the altogether beautiful and healing [Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties]( with Anna Dostoyevskaya on [the secret to a happy marriage]( Virginia Woolf on [what makes love last]( and Kahlil Gibran on [the courage to weather the uncertainties of love]( then revisit Rilke on [inspiration and the combinatorial nature of creativity](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [You Belong Here: An Illustrated Antidote to Our Existential Homelessness]( [youbelonghere.jpg?fit=320%2C440]( There is hardly a more elemental human need than our need for belonging — in a place, in a heart, in ourselves. Perhaps this is why we are so susceptible to that [particular kind of loneliness]( that begins in childhood, as we try to master the [“fertile solitude”]( necessary for self-esteem, and can so often morph into a kind of existential homelessness as we grow older and slip into continually narrowing landscapes of possibility. “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their fantastic 1973 [conversation about freedom](. That elusive, coveted locus of belonging is what poet and writer M.H. Clark explores in the spare and lovely [You Belong Here]( ([public library](. [youbelonghere21.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [youbelonghere1.jpg?resize=680%2C466]( [youbelonghere22.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [youbelonghere2.jpg?resize=680%2C469]( [youbelonghere26.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Illustrated by Isabel Arsenault — the artist behind such treasures as a [picture-book about Louise Bourgeois]( a [graphic novel inspired by Jane Eyre]( and [the story of Virginia Woolf and her sister]( — the lyrical and almost songlike story meets different creatures in their habitats and homes: the whales in the sea, the deer in the forest, the frogs and the lilies in the lake, the lizard on the sunlit rock. Each creature belongs exactly where it is. [youbelonghere3.jpg?resize=680%2C468]( [youbelonghere25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [youbelonghere4.jpg?resize=680%2C467]( [youbelonghere23.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [youbelonghere24.jpg?resize=680%2C441]( An invisible narrator addresses an invisible listener — perhaps a child, or the inner child that lives in each of us — with the assurance that the two belong together, no matter how far and across how many landscapes they may travel from one another. [youbelonghere5.jpg?resize=680%2C467]( [youbelonghere28.jpg?resize=680%2C450]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The stars belong in the deep night sky and the moon belongs there too, and the winds belong in each place they blow by and I belong here with you. [youbelonghere20.jpg?resize=680%2C443]( Complement [You Belong Here]( — sweet consolation for the lifelong alienation that afflicts each of us at different times and in different measures — with Derek Walcott’s [timeless ode to being at home in ourselves]( Carson Ellis’s lovely [illustrated celebration of the many meanings of home]( and Kurt Vonnegut on [belonging in community]( then revisit the beautiful and bittersweet Arsenault-illustrated story of [how Paul Gauguin became an artist]( and Clark’s wonderful [Tiny Perfect Things](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [The Woman Who Smashed Codes: The Untold Story of Cryptography Pioneer Elizebeth Friedman]( [thewomanwhosmashedcodes.jpg?fit=320%2C482]( While computing pioneer Alan Turing was [breaking Nazi communication]( in England, eleven thousand women, unbeknownst to their contemporaries and to most of us who constitute their posterity, were [breaking enemy code in America]( — unsung heroines who helped defeat the Nazis and win WWII. Among them was American cryptography pioneer Elizebeth Friedman (August 26, 1892–October 31, 1980). The subject of Jason Fagone’s excellent biography [The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies]( ([public library]( Friedman triumphed over at least three Enigma machines and cracked dozens of different radio circuits to decipher more than four thousand Nazi messages that saved innumerable lives, only to have J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI take credit for her invisible, instrumental work. [elizebethfriedman1.jpg?resize=648%2C756] Elizebeth Friedman in her twenties. Fagone writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The modern-day universe of codes and ciphers began in a cottage on the prairie, with a pair of young lovers smiling at each other across a table and a rich man urging them to be spectacular. The two young lovers were Elizebeth Smith and William Friedman, and the rich man, the eccentric textile tycoon George Fabyan. The youngest of nine children raised in a modest Quaker home, Elizebeth was born in an era when fewer than four percent of American women graduated from college. Four years after earning her degree in Greek and English literature, she still felt like “a quivering, keenly alive, restless, mental question mark.” The following year, 1916, she began her improbable career at Riverbank Laboratories — Fabyan’s Wonderland-like estate, where the billionaire had hired Elizebeth to work on the cipher at the heart of a literary conspiracy theory claiming that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. At Riverbank, she met William, a young geneticist living in a windmill — one of the many fanciful fixtures of Riverbank — and studying seeds in order to infuse crops with optimal properties as a kind of proto genetic engineering. Over long walks, animated by parallel intellectual voraciousness and shared skepticism of the Bacon cipher conspiracy, the two fell in love. [friedmans1.jpg?resize=552%2C633] William and Elizebeth Friedman, circa 1920s (The George C. Marshall Foundation) William and Elizebeth were married at Riverbank, where they had begun collaborating on cryptographic work. The papers on the subject they wrote together — though always published under William’s name alone — soon spread their reputation beyond Riverbank. Cryptography was new then, new and thrilling and full of unmined possibility for government intelligence, and so the U.S. Navy eventually recruited the Friedmans. Fagone writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The savaging of Nazis, the birth of a science: It begins on the day when a twenty-three-year-old American woman decides to trust her doubt and dig with her own mind. The room is dark but her pencil is sharp. An envelope of puzzles arrives from Washington, sent by men who have the largest of responsibilities and the tiniest of clues. With William she examines the puzzles. He is game, he looks at her with eyes like little bonfires, he is in love with her. She is not in love yet but she would not be ashamed to fall in love with such a bright and kind person. She stares at the odd blocks of text and starts to flip and stack and rearrange them on a scratch pad, a kindling of letters, a friction of alphabets hot to the touch, and then a flame catches and then catches again, until she understands that she can ignite whenever she wants, that a power is there for the taking, for her and for anyone, and nothing will ever be the same. The ribs of a pattern shine through. Something rises at the nib of her pencil and her heart whomps away. The skeletons of words leap out and make her jump. Elizebeth began working for the U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence Division, intercepting and deciphering the encrypted radio messages by which international and domestic smuggling operated. She fused her literary passion with formidable logic to do work hardly anyone else in the country knew how to do — work that didn’t yet have a proper name. Fagone writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]All her life she had celebrated the improbable bigness of language, the long-lunged galaxy that exploded out from the small dense point of the alphabet, the twenty-six humble letters. In college she trained herself to hear the rhythms of playwrights and poets, the syllables that slip from the tongue in patterns. Tennyson: There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. There LIVES more FAITH in HON-est DOUBT, Be-LIEVE me, than in HALF the CREEDS. But before, she had gone no further than chopping lines into meters. She left the words in their boxes, intact. Codebreaking required more drastic measures. Now Elizebeth had to shake the words until they spilled their letters. To rip, rupture, puncture, chisel, scissor, smash, and scoop up the rubble in her arms. To chip off flakes from the smooth rock of the message and place them in piles and ask questions about them. It involved a kind of hard-hearted analytic violence that she had never contemplated before. It was reaching into the red body of the text until the hands dripped with blood… “The thrill of your life,” Elizebeth said later, describing how it felt to solve a message. “The skeletons of words leap out, and make you jump.” [friedmans.jpg?resize=595%2C1005] Elizebeth and William Friedman, circa 1920s (The George C. Marshall Foundation) Although William and Elizebeth worked side by side, often on different classified problems they didn’t share with each other, he always considered her his intellectual superior. More than that, Elizebeth was William’s unfaltering succor when he slipped into depression as World War II began darkening humanity’s horizons. He wrote to her in a letter: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I’ve known for a long time that you are the one in back of me and responsible for what little I’ve done. Had it not been for you I’d have been sunk long ago by unsolved infernal conflicts, by windy storms of emotion, by failure to keep up the fight when things seemed not worthwhile. . . . I know how much I owe to you — for love, for wisdom, for courage, and common sense. By the time the war engulfed the world, Elizebeth Friedman was America’s foremost mind decrypting Nazi communication, using the weapons she had always wielded with uncommon skill: pencil, paper, and perseverance. Fagone writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A telegram arrived in Elizebeth’s office from a magazine writer in New York. “PLEASE COOPERATE BY ANSWERING QUESTIONS BELOW BY RETURN SPECIAL DELIVERY TO ME,” the man wrote. “FOR WHAT DEPARTMENTS DO YOU DECIPHER MESSAGES? HOW MANY HAVE YOU DONE? WHAT TYPES? SENT BY WHOM? HOW DO THEY FALL INTO YOUR HANDS? . . . LIKES, DISLIKES, SUPERSTITIONS HAVE YOU, ANY FURTHER ANECDOTES OF HUMAN INTEREST, HUMOR, OR UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES WOULD BE APPRECIATED.” Across the bottom of the telegram, in large letters, Elizebeth scrawled in disgust, “Ad Absurdum!” She was now the most famous codebreaker in the world, more famous even than Herbert Yardley, the impresario of the American Black Chamber. And she was more famous than her husband, too — a reversal from the longstanding pattern. [elizebethfriedman_code.jpg?resize=680%2C360] Elizebeth Friedman, circa 1940s, with her handwritten cryptanalysis. And yet despite her formative contribution to cryptography as an instrument of military intelligence and the genius with which she operated the instrument to save incalculable lives, Elizebeth Friedman received no public recognition for her work in her lifetime. Part of it, no doubt, was due to the classified nature of the work — even Alan Turing, after all, died a tragic hero [murdered by the very government he had served]( his compatriots unaware of the millions of lives he had saved. But a big part of it, too, has to do with the long history of women in science being denied recognition for their landmark work — from [Lise Meitner and the discovery of fission]( to [Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the detection of pulsars]( to [Vera Rubin and the confirmation of dark matter](. Instead, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, unconstrained by the secrecy oaths Elizebeth had taken and unscrupulous about manipulating the press and the public, undertook an effort to erase her from history and take credit for her work. But the evidence Fagone and other scholars have uncovered in the decades since speaks for itself: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth — William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge. She intended to use all of these archives to write her own story. She never got around to it. Maybe she lost hope. But the files are exactly where she left them, the fragments of an extraordinary life. The files have a weight to them, a texture. They can’t be erased any more than Elizebeth’s legacy can be erased, because her legacy is embedded in our lives today, in our smartphones and Web browsers, in the science that powers secure-messaging apps used by billions, in the clandestine procedures of corporations and intelligence agencies and in the mundane software loaded onto the iPhones in our pockets. With an eye to this bittersweet redemption, Fagone considers Elizebeth Friedman’s unassailable legacy: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Secret communication is still a dance of codemakers and codebreakers, locks and lockpickers. The locks are different now, of course. With computation as an aid, everything has been massively sped up and mathematized beyond anything Elizebeth would have comfortably understood. But the game is still based in patterns. Someone designs a pattern that looks like mere clutter, and someone else tries to rearrange the clutter into a picture. Over and over again, gazing at what seemed random in the world, Elizebeth found a tiny spot of sense, and then she stood on that spot and invented a system to transform the rest of the landscape all the way out to the horizon, and this is still the process today. Codebreaking is work and patience and method and mind. And Elizebeth had more of these qualities than perhaps anyone else in her time. Part fascinating cultural history, part homage to an unsung heroine, and part uncommon love story, [The Woman Who Smashed Codes]( is a fascinating read in its entirety. Complement it with the story of [the unheralded women astronomers]( who shaped our understanding of the universe long before they could vote, then revisit Alan Turing’s beautiful and heartbreaking [letters on love and loss](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now](