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.
One ought, Milena, to take your face in both hands and look you square in the eye, so that you would see yourself in the eyes of the other person, then you could not even think the kinds of things you wrote there.
I can’t keep a storm in my room.
I should stop writing out of shame, because it is so easy.
I’d like to have all the time there is just for you, for thinking about you, for breathing in you.
I therefore place it sealed in your hands, wholly, utterly – just as I have already placed myself in them.
As it is I have no one, no one here except the fear, together we roll through the nights locked in each other’s arms.
And it turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, I want to die and then you do, I want stamps and then you want stamps, sometimes I want to cry on your shoulder like a little boy and then you want to cry on mine like a little girl. And sometimes and ten times and a thousand times and always I want to be with you and you are saying the same thing. Enough, enough.
The less you torment yourself, the less you’ll be tormenting me.
Your eyes seem to be expecting miracles I would be most honored and willing to perform.
At the moment there is nothing definite to say about the question or about me. I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness. Franz.
A man is lying on his deathbed and in the independence gained by the proximity of death, he says: ‘I have spent my life fighting the desire to end it.’ Then a pupil mocks his teacher, who talks of nothing but death: ‘You’re always talking about death and yet you do not die.’ ‘And yet I will die. I’m just singing my last song. One man’s song is longer, another man’s is shorter. At most, however, they differ by only a few words.
I wouldn’t have a thing, not even my name, since I’ve given that to you as well.
The simile of the bird in the hand and the two in the bush has only a very remote application here. In my hand I have nothing, in the bush is everything, and yet – so it is decided by the conditions of battle and the exigency of life – I must choose the nothing.
Leave me my books! I have nothing else.
Whatever it’s actually been, I felt declassed; people who have not lazed away at least part of their time up to their twenty-fifth year are greatly to be pitied, for it’s my belief that it’s not the money you have earned that you take with you into your grave, but your idle time.
It is always the same, always the same.
Whenever I started doing something you didn’t like and you threatened me with the prospect of failure, my reverence for your opinion was so great that failure was, even if only at a later time, inevitable. I lost confidence in my own abilities. I was unsteady, doubtful. The older I got, the more material you could hold against me as proof of my worthlessness; gradually, in a certain regard, you began actually to be right.
You wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.
This getting up early,” he thought, “makes a man quite idiotic.
Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead.