Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

Milena herself expressed the idea that as long as our understanding of art is so imperfect that we require more than just the artist’s statement, ‘as long as we must place our fingers in the wounds, like Thomas, we have the right to convince ourselves the wounds exist, and that they are deep.’

Dear Frau Milena I wrote you a note from Prague and then from Meran. I have not received any answer. It so happens the notes did not require a particularly prompt reply and if your silence is nothing more than a sign of relative well-being, which often expresses itself in an aversion to writing, then I am completely satisfied.

You see, my brain was no longer able to bear the pain and anxiety with which it had been burdened. It said: ‘I’m giving up; but if anyone else here cares about keeping the whole intact, then he should share the load and things will run a little longer.’ Whereupon my lung volunteered, it probably didn’t have much to lose anyway.

After your last letter I’m not going to ask why you don’t leave Vienna for a while, now I understand, but after all there are beautiful places close to Vienna as well, which offer many different cures and possibilities of care.

Dear Frau Milena, today I’d like to write about something else but can’t. Not that this really bothers me; if it did then I would write something else, but now and then a deck chair really should be ready for you somewhere in the garden, half in the shade, with about 10 glasses of milk within easy reach. It might even be in Vienna, even now in the summer—but without hunger and in peace. Is this impossible? And is there no one to make it possible? And what does the doctor say?

In any case the first thing is to lie down in a garden and extract as much sweetness as possible from the ailment, especially if it’s not a genuine disease. There’s a lot of sweetness in that.

You have slept peacefully, even if somewhat ‘oddly,’ even if yesterday you were still ‘out of sorts’—nonetheless your sleep was peaceful. So when sleep passes over me in the night, I know where it is headed and accept this. Of course it would be stupid to resist, sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

And you thank this sleepless man in your last letter. If an uninitiated stranger were to read it, he’d have to think: “What a man! He must have moved mountains here.” But meanwhile he hasn’t done a thing, hasn’t lifted a finger (except to write), is living off milk and good things—without always (although often) seeing ‘tea and apples’—and in general he lets things take their course and leaves the mountains alone.

Where did my insomnia lead me? I’m sure to nothing that was not very well meant. FranzK

You really are unusual, Frau Milena, living there in Vienna where you have to put up with this and that, and still finding time in between to wonder that other people—for instance myself—aren’t doing especially well, and that one night I sleep a little worse than the night before. In this matter my 3 girlfriends here (3 sisters, the oldest 5 years old) have a healthier outlook, they want to throw me into the water at every opportunity, whether we’re by the river or not, and not because I did something mean to them, far from it.

Dear Frau Milena (yes, this heading is becoming burdensome, although it is something to cling to in this uncertain world, like a crutch for sick people; but it’s no sign of recovery when the crutches grow to be a burden), I have never lived among Germans. German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties;

Where does the liveliness, the good mood, the lack of worry come from in your last letter? Has something changed? Or am I mistaken and are the prose pieces helping? Or are you so much in control of yourself and other things as well? What is it?

just read, the letter, your essays, again and again, convinced that such prose does not exist merely for its own sake, but serves as a signpost on the road to a human being, a road one keeps following, happier and happier, until arriving at the realization some bright moment that one is not progressing, simply running around inside one’s own labyrinth, only more nervously, more confused than before. But in any case: this was not written by any ordinary writer.