Feb 12, 2025
Dark. Very still. Night. Its livingness I want to feel and quiet.
— Franz Kafka, from The Penal Colony
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Dark. Very still. Night. Its livingness I want to feel and quiet.
— Franz Kafka, from The Penal Colony
"The moment I talk about anything other than you, I feel as though I were lost."
-Franz Kafka, Letter to Felice dated May 1, 1913.
"Felice, tell me, isn’t it terrible that there is some trouble in your life, and I am excluded from it! Don’t I have to be jealous of the trouble that grips you?"
-Franz Kafka, Letter to Felice dated April 28, 1913.
What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity, or an oddity, or a disagreeable man, someone who neither has nor ever will have any place in society—in short something less than the least.
Well, granting that this is so, I should like to show by my work what the heart of such a nonentity, of such an insignificant man, conceals.
-Vincent Van Gogh, The letters of a post-impressionist.
"Agonizing misunderstandings are the result. Milena, you complain about some letters that you turn them in all directions and nothing falls out, but if I'm not mistaken those are precisely the ones where I was so close to you, my blood so restrained, restraining your own, so deep in the forest, so resting in the rest, that nothing needed to be said, except perhaps that you can see the sky through the trees, that's all.
-Franz Kafka, in a letter to Milena Jesenska dated June 3, 1920.
Haven’t you noticed, Felice, that in my letters I don’t in fact love you; if I did, I would have to think only of you, write only about you; but what I do is worship you.
-Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice Baur dated April 20, 1913.
...Since I did not hold you by your hands, as one holds one’s beloved, but clung to your feet and so made walking impossible for you.
-Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice dated April 14, 1913.
"Dear Frau Milena,
The rain which has been going on for two days and one night has just now stopped, of course probably only temporarily, but nonetheless an event worth celebrating which I am doing by writing to you.
-Franz Kafka, in a letter to Milena Jesenska, April 1920.