Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

  [Prague, November 1920]

  Two letters arrived today. Of course you’re right, Milena; I’m so ashamed of my letters I scarcely dare open your replies. As it happens my letters are true or at least approaching truth—what could I possibly do, faced with your replies, if my letters were lies. The answer’s easy: I would go insane. So I am not performing any great deed by speaking the truth; in fact this is too little; I keep trying to convey something which cannot be conveyed, to explain something which cannot be explained, something in my bones, which can only be experienced in these same bones. In essence it may be nothing more than that fear we have already discussed so often, but extended to everything, fear of the greatest things as well as the smallest, fear, convulsive fear of pronouncing a single word. On the other hand, maybe this fear isn’t simply fear, but also longing for something greater than anything that can inspire fear.

  ‘Dashed to pieces on me’226 is utter nonsense. Only I am at fault, because there was too little truth on my part, still far too little truth, still mostly lies, lies told out of fear of myself and fear of people. This pitcher was broken long before it went to the well. And now I’m keeping my mouth shut in order to stick with the truth a little. Lying is horrible, there’s no worse mental agony. Therefore I beg you: let me be silent, now in my letters, in Vienna in words.

  ‘Dashed to pieces on me’ you write, but I see only that you are torturing yourself, that you find peace outside on the streets—as you write—and nowhere else, while I sit here in a warm room in my robe and slippers, as peacefully as my ‘watch spring’ will allow (for I still have to ‘show the time’).

  I can’t say when I’m leaving until I obtain the residency permit. To stay more than three days a special permit is now required from the local authorities. I applied for that a week ago.

  Why don’t you need the journals any more? I sent the notebooks, also a small volume of Čapek.227

  Where do you know the girl from? I know two relatives who have the disease, and although it abated in both cases, it never disappeared entirely. Of course, it’s a lot worse if the girl is in misery. (In Grimmenstein there is a department exclusively for such diseases.)

  Again I’m thinking about ‘dashed to pieces on me,’ it’s just as incorrect as, say, coming up with the opposite possibility.

  This is neither my defect nor one of other people. It’s just that I belong in the quietest quiet, that’s what’s right for me.

  I clipped this story for you. Leviné was executed by a firing squad in Munich, wasn’t he?228

  [Prague, November 1920]

  Today is Thursday. Up till Tuesday I was honestly determined to go to Gr., though I did occasionally feel something menacing inside me when I thought about it. I also realized the continued postponement of my journey was partly caused by this, but I believed I could easily overcome the whole thing. Tuesday during the day someone told me it’s not necessary to wait in Prague for the residency permit; it can very likely be obtained in Vienna. With that the path was clear. I then agonized on the sofa for a whole afternoon; in the evening I wrote you a letter but didn’t mail it—I still hoped to be able to overcome my feeling, but I spent the whole sleepless night virtually writhing in agony. Two people were struggling within me; one who wants to go and one who is afraid to go—both just parts of me, both undoubtedly scoundrels. I got up the next morning like I did in my worst times.

  I don’t have the strength to leave; I can’t bear the thought in advance that I might be standing before you—I can’t bear the pressure in my brain. Your letter itself is one vast, inevitable disappointment in me, and now this as well. You write that you have no hope, but you do have the hope of being able to leave me completely.

  I can’t explain to you or to anybody what it’s like inside me. How could I begin to explain; I can’t even explain it to myself. But even this is not the main thing; the main thing is obvious: it is impossible to live like a human being around me; you see this and yet you don’t want to believe it?

  [Prague, November 1920]

  Saturday evening

  I still haven’t received the yellow letter, I’ll send it back unopened.

  I’d have to be horribly mistaken if the idea we stop writing one another doesn’t prove to be a good one. But I am not mistaken, Milena. I don’t want to talk about you, not because it’s none of my business—it is my business—I just don’t want to talk about it.

  So I’ll only say this about myself: What you are for me, Milena, beyond the whole world we inhabit, cannot be found in all the daily scraps of paper which I have sent you. As they are, these letters do nothing but cause anguish, and if they don’t cause any anguish it’s even worse. They can only evoke a day in Gmünd, produce misunderstandings and shame, a shame which almost never passes. I want to see you as clearly as I saw you the first time on the street, but the letters cause more distraction than the entire Lerchenfelderstrasse with its noise.

  But not even that is decisive; the deciding factor is my increasing (letter by letter) inability to go beyond the letters: I am powerless toward you as well as toward myself—1000 letters from you and 1000 desires from me will not convince me otherwise—and (perhaps as a result of this powerlessness, but here all causes lie buried in darkness) what is equally decisive is the irresistibly strong voice, literally your voice calling on me to be silent. And now everything concerning you remains unsaid; of course it’s mostly found in your letters (maybe in the yellow one as well, or more correctly: in the telegram you sent—naturally with good reason—demanding I return the letter), frequently in the passages which I fear and avoid like the devil avoids a consecrated place.

  Strange, I also wanted to send you a telegram. I played with the idea for a long time—in bed this afternoon, at the Belvedere this evening, but it would say only this: ‘Request explicit and affirmative reply to underlined passage in last letter.’ But in the end that seemed to contain an unjustified and ugly lack of trust and I didn’t send it.

  So now I’ve been brooding over this letter until 1:30 at night without doing anything else, just staring at it, and through it at you. Sometimes—not in a dream—I see in my mind: Your face is hidden by your hair, which I succeed in parting right and left, your face appears, I run my hands along your forehead to your temples and now I’m holding your face in my hands.

  Monday

  I wanted to tear up this letter, not send it, not answer your telegram, telegrams can mean so many different things—but now both the postcard and the letter have arrived; this card, this letter. But even when faced by them, Milena, and even if I have to bite my tongue to shreds, it wants to speak so badly—how can I believe you need my letters now, when the only thing you need is peace, as you have so often said, half unconsciously. And these letters really are pure anguish, they are caused by incurable anguish and they cause incurable anguish. Moreover it’s even getting worse—what good will my letters be this winter? The only way to live is to be silent and still, here as well as there. With some sadness, fine, what difference does that make? It renders sleep deeper and more childlike. But anguish pulls its plow through sleep—all through the day, too—and that is unbearable.

  IN THE MARGIN: If I do go to a sanatorium, of course I will write you.

  [Prague, end of March 1922]

  It’s been such a long time since I’ve written you,fn20 Frau Milena, and even today I am only writing as the result of coincidence. Actually I don’t have to apologize for my not having written, after all, you know how much I hate letters. All my misfortune in life—I don’t want to complain, just make a generally instructive observation—derives, one might say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always have, and as a matter of fact not those of other people, but my own. In my case this is a particular misfortune which I do not want to discuss further, but it is nevertheless also a general one. The easy possibility of writing letters—from a purely theoretical point of view—must have
brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness. How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. Writing letters, on the other hand, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way. It is this ample nourishment which enables them to multiply so enormously. People sense this and struggle against it; in order to eliminate as much of the ghosts’ power as possible and to attain a natural intercourse, a tranquility of soul, they have invented trains, cars, aeroplanes—but nothing helps anymore: These are evidently inventions devised at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal system, the ghosts invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. They will not starve, but we will perish.

  I’m surprised you haven’t written about this yet, not in order to prevent or achieve something with its publication, it’s too late for that, but at least to let ‘them’ know they have been exposed.

  Incidentally, ‘they’ are also exposed by the exceptions, for it sometimes happens they let a letter through untouched, and it arrives like the light, kind handclasp of a friendly hand. But probably that also merely appears to be so; such cases may be the most dangerous of all, and should be guarded against more carefully than the others. On the other hand, if this is a deception, at least it is a complete one.

  Something like that happened to me today and that’s why I thought of writing you. I received a letter from a friend whom you also know; we haven’t been writing each other for a long time, which is extremely sensible. A corollary of the above is that letters are an excellent antisleeping pill. What shape they’re in when they arrive! Desiccated, empty, and provocative, a single moment of joy with long suffering to follow. While one is reading them and forgetting oneself, the little sleep one has gets up, flies out the open window and doesn’t return for a long time. This is why we haven’t written one another. But I often think about my friend, even if too much in passing. All my thinking is too much in passing. Last night, however, I thought about him a lot, for hours and hours; I spent the deep night hours in bed—these hours which are so costly to me because they are so hostile—using the same words over and over to keep repeating certain things to him in an imaginary letter, things which at that moment seemed extremely important to me. And in the morning a letter from him actually arrived, containing moreover the remark that for a month, or perhaps more correctly a month ago, my friend had had the feeling that he should come and see me, a remark which strangely coincided with things I had experienced.

  This letter incident induced me to write a letter and as long as I’ve begun, how could I not write to you as well, Frau Milena, since you are perhaps the person I enjoy writing to most. (Inasmuch as writing can be enjoyed at all, which I only add for the ghosts surrounding my table, who are waiting and lusting.)

  It’s been a long time since I found anything of yours in the newspapers except the fashion articles which—with a few minor exceptions—have recently seemed happy and calm, especially the last one on spring.229 But it’s true I hadn’t read the Tribuna for 3 weeks beforehand (I’ll try to find the copies)—I was in Spindelmühle.230

  [Prague, September 1922]

  Dear Frau Milena,

  I must confess I once envied someone very much because he was loved, well cared-for, guarded by reason and strength, and because he lay peacefully under flowers. I’m always quick to envy.

  I think I was right to conclude from the Tribuna, which I read often although not constantly, that you have had a good summer. I once acquired a copy in Planá at the station; two women, summer guests, were conversing with each other, one was holding the supplement behind her, in my direction; my sister then borrowed it for me. If I’m not mistaken you had a very funny article attacking the German spas. Once you wrote about the happiness of spending the summer in places far removed by rail, that was also nice; or was that the same article? I don’t think so. As usual when you appear in Národní Listy and leave the Jewish (fashion) school behind, your article about the window displays was grandly superior. Then you translated the essay about the cooks—why?231 Your aunt is peculiar:232 one time she writes how people should stamp their letters properly, next how they shouldn’t throw things out the window, all matters beyond dispute—but hopeless struggles nonetheless. Occasionally, however, something lovely, moving and kind creeps in anyway, if one pays close attention; she just shouldn’t hate the Germans so much—the Germans are wonderful and will remain so. Do you know Eichendorff’s poem: ‘O valleys wide, O mountains!’ or Justinus Kerner’s poem about the saw? If you don’t I’ll copy them for you some day.

  There would be several things to say about Planá, but now it’s already over. Ottla was very kind to me, despite the fact that she has another child apart from me. My lungs were all right, at least out there. I still haven’t been to the doctor here, although I’ve already been back for 14 days. But it can’t be all that bad if, for example, I was able—holy vanity—to chop wood outside for an hour and more without tiring, and was even happy while doing so, at least at times. Other things, sleep and the waking that accompanies it, were occasionally worse. And your lung, that proud, strong, tormented, unshakable creature?

  I just received the enclosed charming letter from your friend Mareš. A few months ago on the street—since our friendship is really just a street acquaintanceship—he asked me in a moment of sudden ebullience whether he might send me his books; I was moved and begged him to do so. The next day his book of poems arrived with a beautiful dedication: ‘for my friend of many years.’233 A few days later, however, a second book came with a postal invoice. I did the easiest thing possible, neither thanked nor paid (by the way, the second book, Policejní Štára,234 is very good; would you like it?) and now comes this invitation I cannot refuse, I’ll send him the money with a small note on the invoice, whereupon I hope that you will move him to return twice the amount.

  A tomcat belongs in the picture? Why is that? The splinter in the head is enough.

  K

  [Prague, January–February 1923]

  Dear Frau Milena, I think it is better not to speak much about guarding one’s rear and all that that involves, just as one avoids speaking of high treason in times of war. These are things one cannot fully understand, at best just guess at, things which reduce one to being a ‘nation.’ And as such, one can influence events, for without nations there is no war; this leads one to assume the right to a voice—in reality, however, events will be judged and decided solely in the unfathomable hierarchy of the authorities. And even if one did succeed in influencing events with one’s words, it would only cause harm, because such words are incompetent, they are uttered uncontrollably as if during sleep, and the world is full of spies who are listening. In light of this the best recourse is to be calm, dignified, and inured to provocations. And here everything really is a provocation, even the grass where you sit beside the long canal. (Completely irresponsibly by the way, at a time when I feel I’m catching cold, although my room is heated and I’m lying in bed under a heating pad, two blankets and a down comforter.) After all, one can only have opinions about how outer appearance affects the world and in this respect my illness puts me at an advantage over your walks, which sound pretty terrible. Because if I talk this way about my disease no one will actually believe me, and as a matter of fact, it really is just a joke.

  I’ll start to read Donadieu very soon, but perhaps I should send it to you beforehand, I know what it is to have such longing and I know one bears a grudge against whoever withholds su
ch a book. For instance, I was prejudiced against several people because, although I could prove nothing, I suspected each of holding on to that copy of Indian Summer—Oskar Baum’s son came running home from an open-air school near Frankfurt because he didn’t have his books there,235 especially his favorite one, Stalky & Co. by Kipling, which he had already read 75 times, I think. So if this applies to Donadieu I’ll send it, but I would like to read it.

  If I had the feuilletons I might not read the fashion articles (where were they this last Sunday?). You’d please me very much if you would always indicate the dates. I’ll get hold of the ‘Devil’ once I can go out; for the time being I still feel some pain.236

  Georg Kaiser—I don’t know much by him and haven’t wanted to know more,237 although I have yet to see something of his on stage. Two years ago his trial made a big impression on me; I read the reports in the Tatra, especially the great defense in which he proclaimed his incontestable right to take things away from others, compared his place in German history to that of Luther, and demanded that flags in Germany be flown at half-mast if he was convicted. Here at my bedside he talked mainly about his oldest child (he has three), a ten-year-old boy whom he doesn’t allow to attend school, but whom he won’t teach either, so that the boy still can’t read or write. However, the boy can draw well and spends the whole day roaming around in the forest and by the lake (they live here in an isolated country house in Grünhaide outside Berlin). When I said to Kaiser (as he was leaving): ‘Well that’s a great thing to do in any case,’ he said: ‘It’s also the only thing worth doing, everything else is pretty worthless.’ Strange and not entirely pleasant to see him like that—half-crazy, half-Berlin businessman, careless happy. He doesn’t seem completely shaken, although in part he seems too much so; supposedly the tropical climate ruined him and nothing else (as a young man he was employed in South America, returned sick, for 8 years lay on the sofa without doing a thing and then began to revive in a sanatorium). His face also reveals this dichotomy: flat with amazingly empty light blue eyes, which however twitch rapidly back and forth like several other features of his face, whereas other parts are so immobile they seem paralyzed. Incidentally, Max has a completely different impression of him, he considers him full of cheer and that’s why in his friendly concern he probably forced Kaiser to come up to see me. And now he’s taking up the whole letter. There are still some things I wanted to say. Next time.