In my magpie way of reading now, 3 or 4 books going at once including recorded titles that tell me stories or lodge history into my mind through a voice – then always a book of poetry, books about the Revolutionary War, 1942, the Bronx in 1977, then a friend’s novel, articles from The Atlantic, the Times, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and just before sleep, Kafka’s Diaries and his Letters To Milena.
His diaries are revelatory. They show him at play. He sets down possible story lines, records images and feelings that struck him that day and that may be useful in another space. None of this is new to the journals and diaries of any writer, but what is unique is how effortlessly he ignores patterns of thought which could serve to create boundaries for his work. He possessed an anarchic imagination and that very rare quality, the ability to see the details in the mundane that make anything new. This combination makes for a sense of immediacy in even his simplest observations. As in his fiction, Kafka finds a way to see the strangeness of the world that is always there, just beneath its placid surface:
“How childishly a tinsmith, visible through the open door of his shop, sits at his work and keeps striking with the hammer.”
“In the strongly sunlit yard two dogs were running toward each other from opposite directions.”
“Didn’t yield to my great desire to begin a new story. It’s all useless. When I can’t chase stories through the nights, they escape and get lost.”
“If one recognizes one’s limits very keenly, one must be blown to pieces.”
Kafka wanted his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his work, including his letters. Brod did not listen and thus we have his letters to Milena Jesenka, a young woman and the translator of some of his stories in Czech. An epistolary relationship that steps beyond business is likely to also become personal, maybe even intimate because it is conducted in print with a lapse of time between exchanges. One imagines the recipient of the letter ideally. The friction of his or her presence has been removed. No odd glances, no telling hesitations in response, no ambivalent tones in the voice. There may come a point where anything may pour out without fear.
Kafka wrote in his bedroom when everyone else had gone to sleep. That is how you must imagine him writing to Milena. He is by turns funny, lighthearted, businesslike, confessional, agonizing, and edging toward declarations:
“I’m not saying goodbye. There isn’t any goodbye, unless gravity, which is lying in wait for me, pulls me down entirely. But how could it, since you are alive.”
I do not read Kafka to bring on nightmares. On the contrary, his voice reaches me more directly than almost any other writer in giving me a feeling of solidarity – not as one who writes, but as a fellow screwed up human being trying to make his way in a life that often feels wholly absurd.
