Word: kafka
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...Kafka met Felice in 1912 at Max Brod's Prague apartment. He was 30 and still entertained hope of marriage to a bright, cheerful, uncomplicated girl. A month after her return to Berlin, his first letter began a seduction aimed not at getting Felice to bed but at idealizing her on a pedestal where she could intensify his feelings of inadequacy...
...mood for continual and, as it were, circular complaining," he writes, as the formal Sie changes to the intimate Du. In two and sometimes three letters a day, Kafka compiled a monumental case history of his neuroses. Each balanced sentence, each self-lacerating perception seems to be an end in itself. It is almost as if Kafka set up the situation so he could write about the turmoil it caused him. He despised himself for still living at home with his mother and father, a bluff haberdasher whom Kafka attempted to blame for his neurasthenia. For the full treatment read...
Though his letters to Felice point shakily toward marriage, Kafka tells her only of his drawbacks. He claims to be weak and easily fatigued. He raises the suspicion of impotence: "You are a girl and want a man, not a flabby worm on the earth." He writes how he hates his civil service job at Prague's Workers' Accident Insurance Institute...
...presents himself as hopelessly mendacious, God's own holy spoiled brat. Nobody expresses that blind human appetite for having everything at the same time as well as Kafka: "I strive to know the entire human and animal community, to recognize their fundamental preferences, desires, and moral ideals, to reduce them to simple rules, and as quickly as possible to adopt these rules so as to be pleasing to everyone ... to become so pleasing that in the end I might openly act out my inherent baseness before the eyes of the world without forfeiting its love-the only sinner...
...November 1912, Kafka reports that he has half-completed "an exceptionally repulsive story." It is "The Metamorphosis," and he explains to Felice that it springs from "the same heart in which you dwell." Because he is wedded to writing, he warns that his wife would necessarily lead "a monastic life...