The total of three engagements Kafka entered into (twice with Bauer, the other with Julie Wohryzek, a poor hotel chambermaid) disintegrated, generally speaking, because of Kafka’s inability to envision any kind of what we today call work-life balance. His asceticism was meant to foster his writing, but it also made him a largely unhappy person, which hampered his efforts. Near the end of his life, he wrote in his diary of the severity that led him to become a “physical wreck”: “I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy
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Likewise- it appears to be my own fate.
