Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

nonetheless an event worth celebrating, which I am doing by writing to you.

But this passion for letters is senseless. 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!

I’ve lost my way a little, but that doesn’t matter, because if you’ve accompanied me, then we’re both lost.

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.

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.

Somehow I can’t write about anything but what concerns us and us alone, in the middle of the crowded world. Everything else is foreign to me. Wrong! Wrong! But my lips are babbling and my face is lying in your lap.

(you claim you haven’t done enough nice things for me, but is there anything nicer, any greater honor you can show me than simply being with me and allowing me to sit in front of you?).

I’m tired, can’t think of a thing, and my sole wish is to lay my head in your lap, feel your hand on my head, and stay that way through all eternity—

WRITTEN DIAGONALLY ACROSS THE TOP OF TWO PAGES, IN LARGE LETTERS: I’m only babbling like this because I feel so good with you in spite of everything.

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 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. But between this daytime world

Why can’t one accept the fact that the right thing to do is live inside this very special tension which keeps suicide suspended? (I tried to laugh at you when you occasionally said something similar.) Why does one attempt instead to ease it, in petulance, and then burst out of it like an irrational animal (even loving this irrationality like an animal), thereby bodily absorbing all the disrupted, wild electricity, so that one is practically consumed?

And this isn’t an agonizing picture at all, but the best I’m capable of right now: you’re lying in bed, I’m nursing you a little, now and then I walk over to you and place my hand on your forehead, I sink into your eyes whenever I’m looking at you, and feel your eyes on me whenever I’m walking around the room and all the time I am aware, with a pride I can no longer contain, that I am living for you, that I am allowed to do so, and that, in this way, I am beginning to thank you for the fact that you once stopped beside me and gave me your hand. Furthermore, this would only be a sickness which passes quickly, leaving you healthier than you were before, one which lets you arise once again in all your greatness; whereas I would just crawl under the earth: suddenly and soon, hopefully without noise and pain.—This doesn’t cause me the slightest agony, but the idea you might fall ill far away

I, an animal of the forest, was at that time hardly even in the forest; I was lying somewhere in a dirty ditch (dirtied only by my presence, of course) when I saw you outside in the open—the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. I forgot everything, forgot myself completely, I stood up, approached—admittedly anxious within this new but familiar freedom—I ventured even closer, all the way up to you. You were so good, I crouched down beside you as if it were my right, I laid my face in your hand, I was so happy, so proud, so free, so mighty, so much at home, again and again: so much at home—but in essence I remained a mere animal, just part of the forest, living in the open only by your grace. I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it (since I had forgotten everything). This couldn’t last.

everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated.

But there is another difference as well: you can stand the truth like no one else, and one can tell you the truth both for one’s own sake and for yours; in fact, one can even discover one’s own truth directly through you.

It’s a little as if instead of just having to wash up, comb one’s hair, etc.; before every walk—which is already difficult enough—a person is constantly missing everything he needs to take with him, and so each time he has to sew his clothes, make his boots, manufacture his hat, cut his walking stick, etc. Of course it’s impossible to do all of that well; it may hold up for a few blocks, but then suddenly, at the Graben, for example, everything falls apart and he’s left standing there naked with rags and pieces.

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.