Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

that is past and should remain deep in the past.

I would be incapable of either speech or silence, or more precisely: I would be speaking even with my silence, because at the moment I am nothing but a single word.

I can’t think of anything to write, I’m just walking around here between the lines, underneath the light of your eyes, in the breath of your mouth like in some beautiful happy day, which stays beautiful and happy even if my head is sick, tired,

if I were simultaneously giving you nourishment with the milk I drink, giving you strength with the air I breathe, as it wafts up from the garden; no, all that isn’t enough, it would have to give you much more strength than it does me.

what’s happening is incredible—my world is collapsing, my world is rebuilding itself: wait and see how you (meaning me) survive it all. I’m not lamenting the falling apart, it was already in a state of collapse, what I’m lamenting is the rebuilding, I lament my waning strength, I lament being born, I lament the light of the sun.

(now I’m even losing my name—it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)

With you in my heart I can bear everything,

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 below me in the forest and my resting on your almost naked breast. And that’s why you’re right in saying we were already one and I’m not afraid of this; on the contrary, it is my only happiness and my only pride and I don’t at all restrict it to the forest.

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.

you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.

You cannot, Milena, exactly understand what it’s about, or in part was about, I don’t even understand it myself, I am shaking from the eruption; you can torture me to the point of insanity, but what it is and what it ultimately wants I do not know.

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.

I am powerless toward you as well as toward myself