Letters to Milena
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Read between September 16 - September 29, 2024
4%
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It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.
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Despite all this, writing really is a good thing; I am now calmer than I was 2 hours ago outside on the balcony with your letter. While I was lying there a beetle had fallen on its back one step away and was desperately trying to right itself; I would have gladly helped—it was so easy, so obvious, all that was required was a step and a small shove—but I forgot about it because of your letter; I was just as incapable of getting up. Only a lizard again made me aware of the life around me, its path led over the beetle, which was already so completely still that I said to myself, this was not an ...more
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see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting; even so, when I then want to raise my eyes to your face, in the middle of the letter—what a story!—fire breaks out and I see nothing but fire.
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Isn’t one letter enough, isn’t one knowing enough? Of course it is, but nevertheless I am tilting my head way back, drinking the letters, aware only that I don’t want to stop drinking. Explain that, teacher Milena!
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Of course Milena doesn’t know you, she has been blinded by a few stories and letters; she is like the sea, as strong as the sea with its masses of water, crashing down with all their might, but nonetheless by some mistake, following the whim of the dead and above all distant moon.
13%
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I reread the Sunday letter, it’s even more frightening than I thought at first. One ought, Milena, to take your face in both hands and look you square in the eye, so that you would see yourself in the eyes of the other person, then you could not even think the kinds of things you wrote there.
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A man plagued by his own devils takes revenge on his fellow man without giving it a thought.
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Good heavens, Milena, if you were here, and my pitiful, unthinking mind! And still I would be lying if I said I missed you: it’s the most perfect, most painful magic, you are here, just as I am and even more so; wherever I am, there you are too, and even more intensely.
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Then your lovely lovely telegram came, to comfort me against the night, my old enemy (if the comfort doesn’t last it really isn’t your fault, but the fault of the nights. These short earthly nights are almost enough to make one fear the eternal night)—
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I know my relationship to you (you belong to me, even if I should never see you again)
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After all, I can’t keep a storm in my room; in these letters you undoubtedly have the magnificent head of Medusa, the snakes of terror are quivering about your head so wildly, while the snakes of fear quiver even more wildly about my own.
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In the meantime I was able to observe you some, though it didn’t matter to me in the least what you looked like—your words were all I cared about.
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Today I looked at a map of Vienna, for a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that they would build such a huge city when you only need one room. F
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Today Milena, Milena, Milena—I can’t write anything else.
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The trip? At first it was entirely uncomplicated, there wasn’t a single newspaper on the platform. A reason to run back out; you were no longer there—that was all right. Then I reboarded, the train pulled out, I started reading my paper, still everything was fine, after a while I stopped reading, but then suddenly you were no longer there; or actually you were there and I felt your presence with all my soul, although this kind of being there was very different from the kind we knew during the 4 days and I first had to become accustomed to it.
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What else shall I say? My throat does not obey, nor do my hands.
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I’m numbering at least these letters, not one of them can miss you, just like I couldn’t miss you in the little park.
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Here there are various documents lying around, a few letters I just read, an exchange of greetings with the director in his office (not dismissed) and other colleagues here and there, and accompanying all of this is a little bell ringing in my ear: “She’s not with you any more,” of course there’s also a mighty bell somewhere in heaven ringing: “She will not leave you,” but after all, the small bell is in my ear. And then again there is the night-letter, it’s impossible to understand how my breast could expand and contract enough to breathe this air, it’s impossible to understand how you can be ...more
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Stay with me always!
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A slight blow for me: a telegram from Paris, informing me that an old uncle of mine—whom I am really very fond of, who lives in Madrid, and who hasn’t been here for many years—is arriving tomorrow evening. It is a blow because it will take time and I need all the time I have and a thousand times more than all the time I have and most of all I’d like to have all the time there is just for you, for thinking about you, for breathing in you. My apartment is making me restless, the evenings are making me restless, I’d like to be someplace different. I’d like many things to be different and I’d ...more
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Either the world is so tiny or else we are so gigantic; in any case we fill it completely.
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It’s a little gloomy in Prague, I haven’t received any letters, my heart is a little heavy. Of course it’s impossible that a letter could be here already, but explain that to my heart.
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And actually it’s not at all you I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me.
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Of course there’s no more beautiful fate for a story than for it to disappear,
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You write you might come to Prague next month. I almost feel like saying: Don’t come. Leave me the hope that you’ll come immediately if I should ever be in urgent need and ask you to do so—but right now it would be better if you didn’t come, since you’d only have to leave again.
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I’m only babbling like this because I feel so good with you in spite of everything.
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And it turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, I want to die and then you do, I want stamps and then you want stamps, sometimes I want to cry on your shoulder like a little boy and then you want to cry on mine like a little girl. And sometimes and ten times and a thousand times and always I want to be with you and you are saying the same thing. Enough, enough.
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after a bad night’s sleep one just asks who knows what. And one would like to go on asking forever; after all, not-sleeping means asking; if one had the answer, one would sleep.
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Maybe my condition isn’t the best it could be, maybe I could stand a little more happiness, a little more security, a little more abundance, although that is by no means certain, even in Prague. However, in any case I’m generally happy and free and doing well—completely undeservedly—so well it scares me, and if current conditions hold a while, if the upheavals aren’t too great, and if I receive a word from you each day and see that this doesn’t cause you too much torment, then this word will probably be enough to make me halfway healthy.
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There is a particular human kindness which people do not realize exists.
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But there is also another, really extraordinary reason why I am staying calm in the face of all this. You have a certain peculiarity—I believe it comes from deep inside your being, and someone else is at fault if it isn’t always effective—which I have never seen in anyone else and which I can’t even imagine, although I have found it in you. It is your inability to make other people suffer. Not out of pity, but just because you can’t.
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I’m not at all as sad as you might think from my letter; there’s just nothing else to say at the moment. It’s grown so still; one doesn’t dare break the silence with a single word.
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So we’ll be together Sunday after all, 5, 6 hours—too little for talking, enough to share the silence, hold hands, look into each other’s eyes.
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It was all enticing, exciting, and disgusting, even before we reached the hotel, and it wasn’t any different inside.
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I was actually happy, but this happiness was only because my eternally grieving body had given me some peace at last,
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And when you once asked how I could have called that Saturday “good” with this fear inside my heart, it isn’t difficult to explain. Because I love you (you see, I do love you, you dimwit, my love engulfs you the way the sea loves a tiny pebble on its bed—and may I be the pebble with you, heaven permitting) I love the whole world and that includes your left shoulder—no, the right one was first and so I’ll kiss it whenever I want to (and whenever you’re kind enough to pull down your blouse a little) and that also includes your left shoulder and your face above me in the forest and your face ...more
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Over there lies an affair of the night, absolutely and in every respect; here, on the other hand, is the world which I possess, and now I’m supposed to leap across into the night in order to repossess it. But can anything be repossessed? Doesn’t that imply losing it?
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This is why I’m so grateful (to you and to everything), and so it’s “natural” I am extremely calm and extremely uncalm, extremely constrained and extremely free whenever I’m next to you. This is also why, following this realization, I have renounced all other life.
53%
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I was reading it I felt I was walking up and down in front of the café, day and night, year after year; every time a guest came or went I would peer in through the open door to check that you were still inside. Then I would resume the pacing and waiting. This was neither straining nor sad. And how could it be straining or sad to wait in front of a café when you are inside!
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You write that you sometimes feel like testing me. That was only a joke, wasn’t it? Please don’t do it. It takes so much energy just to recognize someone; how much more would it take not to recognize!
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What does his occasional “infidelity” matter? It isn’t even “infidelity,” since you both walk the same road, just that he veers a little to the left along the way. What does this “infidelity” matter, which will keep welling up in any case in your deepest sorrow as in your deepest happiness? What does this “infidelity” matter compared to my eternal bond!
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Sometimes I feel as though I had lead weights so heavy they’re bound to pull me down into the deepest sea in a minute, and anyone who wanted to grab me or even “save” me would just let me go, not out of weakness or even desperation, but simply out of sheer annoyance.
55%
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It’s simply the oppressed breathing of an oppressed chest.
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since then I have been singing one single song for you, incessantly; it’s always different and always the same, as rich as a dreamless sleep, boring and exhausting,
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I kept wanting to hear a different sentence than you did, this one: “You’re mine.” And why that one in particular? It doesn’t even mean love, just nearness and night.
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I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity.
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No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell—
57%
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Today I did practically nothing except sit around and read a little here, a little there—but mostly I did nothing,
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Why can’t one accept the fact that the right thing to do is live inside this very special tension which keeps suicide suspended?
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That’s why I’m independent of you to a certain extent—precisely because the dependency transcends all bounds. The either/or is too great. Either you are mine, in which case it’s good, or else I lose you, in which case it’s not actually bad but simply nothing at all: no jealousy, no suffering, no anxiety, nothing at all.
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