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tags:loverelationshipfriendship
NOTE
I first read this years ago in Kafka’s letters to her. Bits of it have stuck with me.
That is where it begins. Two people - two small, lonely human beings, exposed to the entire hopelessness, dismay and forlornness of life, two children of men on the gigantic earth, that is so unbelievably, unbearably and scaringly large, two people who are unhappy by natural and ordinary law -these two people should abruptly, spontaneously, around half past nine in the morning, locked in an apartment, having one name, one set of belongings, one destiny, should all of a sudden, just because they are two, be happy?
If two people marry thinking they do it in order to be happy together, they have already deprived themselves of the mere possibility to be happy.
It is tremendously difficult to get to know a person. I think I am not exaggerating when I say that you can either get to know someone after half an hour of talking or after living together for 10 years. It is almost impossible that two people, before they marry, will as much as guess who they are and whom they marry.
I will not give you back:
The greatest promise that a woman and a man may give each other is the sentence you smilingly say to children: ‘I will not give you back.’ Is that not more than ‘I will love you till death do us part’ or ’ I will be forever faithful to you’? I will not give you back. This contains everything. Decency, truthfulness, homeyness, faithfulness, belongingness, decisiveness, friendship. How infinitely big is such a promise compared to this little happiness.
Should marriage have a meaning, it needs to be based on a broader and more real foundation than the longing for happiness. Let us not fear this little bit of suffering, the bit of pain and unhappiness. Try once to look up for 5 minutes to the starry night sky, spellbound, sincere, and concentrated. Or stand on the top of a mountain from where you can see a little piece of earth. And you will understand, after a while, the importance of life and the unimportance of happiness. Happiness: as if the ability to be happy was not dependent on us and us alone! As if the talent to be happy was not a special talent like the talent to sing or write or repair shoes or do politics! Give a person everything, all he asks for, cover him with love, gifts, little presents, everything he wishes for, still he will not be happy. And beat another person so he can barely breath, and yet, as soon as he discovers a bunch of fresh carrots, shining red with green, he will be happy.
There are two options in life: either accept your destiny, decide yourself for it and live with it, respect it and own it with its benefits and losses, happiness and misery, do it in a brave, honest way, without bargaining, be generous and modest. Or instead seek out your destiny; but with this search you lose not only strength, time, dreams, rightful and good blindness, and a certain instinct for things, with this search you also lose your own value. You constantly get poorer. What is there to come is always worse than what you had.