Love Letter: Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt

Dear Miss Arendt!
I must come see you and speak to your heart.
Everything should be simple and clear and pure between us.
We never know what we can become for others through our Being. The path your life will take is hidden.
We must be reconciled to that. And my loyalty to you shall only help you remain true to yourself.
“Be happy!” — that is now my wish for you.
Only when you are happy will you become a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness,
security, repose, reverence, and gratitude to life.
Just once I would like to be able to thank you and, with a kiss on your pure brow, take the honor of your being into my work.

Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp?
Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find nothing that suffices.
We can only thank with our selves.

Being close is a matter of being at the greatest distance from the other.
The other’s presence suddenly breaks into our life — no soul can come to terms with that.
A human fate gives itself over to another human fate, and the duty of pure love is to keep this giving
as alive as it was on the first day.
This “withdrawal” from everything human and breaking off all connections is, with regard to creative work,
the most magnificent human experience I know — One’s heart is ripped from one’s body.

The evening and your letters have renewed my certainty that everything stays close to what is good, and becomes good.
You, even in your situation, must be happy as only those with a young heart and strong expectations
and faith can be at the prospect of a new world — new learning, fresh air, and growth.
May each of us be a match for the other’s existence, that is, for the freedom of faith and for the inner
necessity of an unalloyed trust — that will preserve our love.
Although you have remained as present to me as you were on the first day, your letter brought you particularly close.
I hold your loving hands in mine and pray with you for your happiness.

Ask the innermost part of your heart, which has shone on me so often from your wonderfully deep eyes;
it will tell you: deep down I am completely and purely sure of this trust.
Your letter has shaken me as much as first being close to you did.
Those days have returned with such elemental power, thanks to this word of your love.
For me it was as if I had been favored to give away something ultimate and great, so as to receive it,
the gift and the giving, as a new possession.

I love you as I did on the first day.
The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought.
The solitude of this path is self-chosen and is the only way of living given me.
But the desolation that fate has kept in store, would have taken from me the strength to live in the world.
Only you have a right to know this, because you have always known it.
The path itself is nothing but the commitment our love makes me responsible for.
I would lose my right to live if I lost my love for you,
but I would also lose this love and its reality if I shirked the responsibility it forces on me.

We can only thank with our selves. Love transforms gratitude into loyalty to our selves and unconditional faith in the other.
That is how love steadily intensifies its innermost secret.