On guarding what you cannot enter
“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.”
Rilke is describing love, and the verb he reaches for is guard. Not understand, not share — guard, the way one guards a border one has no intention of crossing.
It cuts against the assumption that closeness means the removal of distance. What he proposes is harder and quieter: two people each keeping something the other will never have access to, and each treating that inaccessible part as the thing most worth protecting.