“The easy possibility of writing letters 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 the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.”
“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
A compendium of letters written by Kafka to Milena, which was published posthumously. The former never intended for any of the epistolary expressions to be publicised, but some decided it necessary.
In any case, it has been several months since I’ve finished reading this, but some fervent memories remain. Vignettes of life and love…with all its concomitant agony and sorrow. There was something unimaginably sad about Kafka’s limpid prose… the “fragments of four days snatched from the night”, the idylls of their love affair that soon became “pure anguish”… then followed soon after by his passing.
Compendium of Words 