Kafka letter to felice, 11 April 1913.
We are now so far apart, Felice, that I didn’t get the picture postcard you seem to have mailed on Wednesday evening, until today, Friday. I am aware of these distances (not just now, for I am completely numbed by a bad story of Friedrich Huch’s that I read in the Neue Rundschau, but as a rule, for instance when I saw your postcard lying on the table)—no, I am not going on; you see, this is how sometimes everything collapses over my head. Actually, I only wanted to tell you that it occurred to me the other day quite by chance that I could easily be living in Vienna, and how terrible the distance between us would be then, how in Prague it is only just bearable, and what a desolate place way down there Vienna is, although 6 months ago it was closer to Prague than Berlin.
The postcard must have been written at 4 o’clock, you were sitting in the dining car, how clearly I can see you, I can give a description of where you were sitting: If this was the direction in which you were traveling ←, then, seen from that direction, I imagine you sitting at the last or last but one table on the right by the window, facing the engine. I could have drawn it, but then I should have had to leave your seat empty, and I didn’t want to do that. Should you maintain that you sat elsewhere, I won’t believe it. However I have just noticed that I certainly must have been wrong, for in my imagination I visualized the entire dining car completely empty except for you, and I have to force myself to see the waiter who hands you the picture postcard.
By the way, the other day I had a wildly confused dream about you, and Max and his wife. We were in Berlin, and among other things we found all the Grunewald lakes, which you couldn’t even show me in reality, right in the middle of the town, one behind the other. Perhaps I was alone when this discovery was made, I probably wanted to find you, almost willfully lost my way, and from a jetty saw some kind of strange, grayish black, indenable apparitions, asked a passerby for information, and learned that these were the Grunewald lakes and that, though right in the middle of the town, I was nevertheless a very long way from you. Then we were also in Wannsee, which you didn’t like (in my dream your actual remark kept sounding in my ears); we passed through a wrought-iron gate as into a park or a cemetery, and had many experiences, for the telling of which it is now too late. I should also have to delve too deeply to remember them. Goodnight and happier dreams.
