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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

love letter by Franz Kafka

Fräulein Felice!

I am now
going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as
such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test
that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:

Write to
me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot
endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I
answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats
through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is
really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for
this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so
much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you
are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my
office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and
opening them only when I am with you? Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not
doing so. To make it short: My health is only just good enough for myself alone,
not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter,
I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

If only
I had your answer now! And how horribly I torment you, and how I compel you, in
the stillness of your room, to read this letter, as nasty a letter as has ever
lain on your desk! Honestly, it strikes me sometimes that I prey like a spectre
on your felicitous name! If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I
implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise.
Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a
peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only
once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be
serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday
letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with
what energy remains to me at the end of this letter: If we value our lives, let
us abandon it all.

Did I think of signing myself Dein? No, nothing could
be more false. No, I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s
what I must try to live with.

Franz
11 November, 1912

Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) worked for
much of his life as an official in an insurance company. His extrordinary works
of fiction were written largely in his spare time and many of his novels were
published after his death from tuberculosis. Kafka first met Felice Bauer in
1912; for five years they pursued a tempestuous and ultimately unfulfilled love
affair.

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