Letters to Milena:
I still haven’t received the yellow letter, I’ll send it back unopened. I’d have to be horribly mistaken if the idea of we stop writing one another doesn’t prove to be a good one. But I am not mistaken, Milena. I don’t want to talk about you, not because it’s none of my business - it is my business - I just don’t want to talk about it. So I’ll only say this about myself: What you are for me, Milena, beyond the whole world we inhabit, cannot be found in all the daily scraps of paper which I have sent you. As they are, these letters do nothing but cause anguish, and if they don’t cause anguish it’s even worse. They can only evoke a day in Gmund, produce misunderstandings and shame, a shame which almost never passes. I want to see you as clearly as I saw you the first time on the street, but the letters cause more distraction than the entire Lerchenfelderstrasse with its noise. But not even that is decisive; the deciding factor is my increasing (letter by letter) inability to go beyond the letters: I am powerless towards you as well as toward myself - 1000 letters from you and 1000 desires from me will not convince me otherwise - and (perhaps as a result of this powerlessness, but here all cause like buried in darkness) what is equally decisive is the irresistibly strong voice, literally your voice calling me on to be silent. And now everything concerning you remains unsaid.
Reading: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.