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Kafka’s Beautiful and Heartbreaking Love Letters
原文链接：
[第一段]
“Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences,” a wise woman once said, echoing Rilke (里尔克）’s memorable proclamation that love is “perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” When we fall in love, we are asked to rise to this task — a polarizing pull that stretches the psyche in opposite directions as we crave surrender and safety in equal measure.
要掌握的单词
relationships n. 人际关系；情侣关系
relationship n. 关联 - 比如 sino-US relationship 中美关系
Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences
谈恋爱也许是我们最好的学习机会。
Perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.
谈恋爱是最难搞定的任务，和谈恋爱相比，其他任何事情都是小菜一碟。（里尔克这么认为，你觉得呢？）
[第二段]
The discomfort of this wildly disorienting bidirectional pull is what 29-year-old Franz Kafka(卡夫卡童鞋) articulated in a beautiful and heartbreaking letter to Felice Bauer（卡夫卡的女盆友）, a marketing rep for a dictation machine company whom the young author had met at the home of his friend and future biographer Max Brod in August of 1912. Young Franz and Felice immediately began a correspondence of escalating intensity, with Kafka frequently exasperated — as was Vladimir Nabokov（ 弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫） the start of his lifelong romance with Véra — over his beloved’s infrequent and insufficiently romantic response. Over the five-year course of their turbulent, mostly epistolary relationship, they were engaged twice, even though they met in person only a few times. During that period, Kafka produced his most significant work, including The Metamorphosis（变形记，人变大甲虫的故事）. Five hundred of his letters survive and were posthumously published in the intensely rewarding and revelatory Letters to Felice (public library).
看看就行了的单词：
discomfort n. 不安
disorienting adj. 令人迷惑的
correspondence n. 通信
escalating intensity 越来越热烈
exasperated adj. 被激怒的
要掌握的单词：
engaged adj. 订婚的
Over the five-year course of their turbulent, mostly epistolary relationship, they were engaged twice, even though they met in person only a few times.
这对璧人的感情吵吵闹闹，两地分隔五年，基本只靠书信来往，虽然只谋面过数次，却订婚了两次。
大乐乐脑内小剧场：好吧，你们赢了。
[第三段]
In November of 1912, three months after he met Felice, Kafka writes:
Fräulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?
要掌握的单词：
endure vi. 容忍
confuse vt. 使困惑
It confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life.
一想到你穿啥，我就六神无主了，我就活不下去了。（好脆弱的卡夫卡）
It在这里指代前面提到的what you were wearing
[第四段]
Whether out of self-protective rationalization or mere pragmatism — the onset of tuberculosis（肺结核） was, after all, what ended the relationship five years later — he plaintively points to a physiological reason, almost as an excuse for the psychological:
Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not doing so. To make it short: 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.
要掌握的单词：
overlook vt. 忽略
Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.
然而，读着你的信，我又觉得我能够克服万难啦。
[第五段]
He resumes his plea, which seems directed more at himself than at her:
If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise. Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with what energy remains to me at the end of this letter…
要掌握的单词：
cure vt. 治愈
foresee vt. 预见
No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters.
要是我的痛苦能被这种方式治愈，那它就不叫痛苦了。我已经预见到了，我不忍卒读你周日的来信。
[第六段]
He closes in true Kafkaesque fashion:
If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.
要掌握的单词：
value vt. 重视
abandon vt. 放弃；抛弃
fetter vt. 束缚
If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.
如果我们珍惜自己的生命，那么就只有放弃这段感情。我是我自己永远的囚徒，我就是这样的人，我只能这样活下去。
大乐乐脑内小剧场：你确定不是为分手找借口吗？
[第七段]
It makes sense, of course, for a man who associated pleasure with pain — nowhere more vividly than in his famous proclamation that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” — to experience love as at once elating and anguishing. But the paradox of love is perhaps the same as that of art, which Jeanette Winterson so elegantly termed “the paradox of active surrender” — in order for either to transform us, we must let it turn us over and inside-out. That is what Rilke called love’s great exacting claim, and in that claim lies its ultimate reward.
要掌握的单词：
associate a with b 将a与b联系在一起
pleasure n. 欢愉
pain n. 痛苦
elating adj. 得意洋洋的
anguishing adj. 极度痛苦的
It makes sense, of course, for a man who associated pleasure with pain — nowhere more vividly than in his famous proclamation that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” — to experience love as at once elating and anguishing.
对于一个总是痛并快乐着的人而言，这很正常。正如卡夫卡的名言：书像一把利斧，劈开我们心中的冰冻之海。” 对他而言，爱情就是冰火两重天的事情，快乐之极，又痛入骨髓。
大乐乐脑内小剧场：怪不得只活了41岁。
Kafka on Love and Patience
原文链接：
“Patience is the master key to every situation. One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing.”
[第一段]
One March morning in 1920, a Czech(捷克) teenager named Gustav Janouch（卡夫卡同事的儿子） arrived at the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institution, where his father worked. The purpose of the visit was for the seventeen-year-old aspiring poet to meet his father’s famous colleague, Metamorphosis author Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924), who had been laboring at the insurance company for twelve years. The two struck an unlikely friendship and for the remaining four years of Kafka’s life, they frequently shared long walks through the city, talking about literature and life.
要掌握的单词：
strike vt. 遇到；邂逅；偶然发现 过去式 struck struck
The two struck an unlikely friendship and for the remaining four years of Kafka’s life, they frequently shared long walks through the city, talking about literature and life.
17岁的Gustav Janouch和卡夫卡一见投缘，在随后的四年中，两人经常城中漫步，畅谈文学和人生，直到卡夫卡去世。
[第二段]
In 1951, long after Kafka’s death, Janouch published his recollection of these remarkably rich walking talks as Conversations with Kafka (public library).What makes these conversations so compelling is that much of what is said counters the familiar image of Kafka as a creature of grievance and gloom.Perhaps because we are constantly entraining each other through conversation and the young man’s openhearted optimism awakened dormant parts of Kafka’s spirit, there is radiance in a great deal of what they discuss — art (“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”), poetry (“Goethe says practically everything that matters to us human beings.”), and love.
要掌握的单词：
counter vt. 反驳
grievance n. 不满
gloom n. 阴郁
What makes these conversations so compelling is that much of what is said counters the familiar image of Kafka as a creature of grievance and gloom.
这些对谈引人入胜之处就在于卡夫卡在其中一反过去那种愤世嫉俗，阴郁深沉的形象。
[第三段]
In reflecting on the anguish of ill-fated love affairs, Kafka offers a magnificent definition of love and its hazards, at once utterly elevating and utterly grounding:
What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
要掌握的单词：
enhance vt. 提升
widen vt. 拓宽
enrich vt. 使丰富
height n. 高度
depth n. 深度
What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
爱情是什么呢？爱情是一切能让我们不断提升、开阔眼界、丰富自我的事物。爱情能够加深人生的深度，拓展人生的广度。爱情如汽车，车本身没毛病，关键在于谁开车，谁乘车，和走什么样的道路。
[第四段]
Far more often than we like to imagine, those problems can steer the car toward a crash. Kafka himself was intimately familiar with heartbreak, as evidenced by his beautiful and harrowing love letters. But perhaps because “heartbreak is how we mature,” his own experience is what allowed the author to offer young Gustav such strangely assuring advice in comforting the Gustav’s distress over his parents’ divorce — a rupture of the heart that had rendered him hopeless about the possibility of happiness in love. Echoing Nietzsche’s belief that a fulfilling life requires embracing difficulty, Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
要掌握的单词：
mature vi.成熟
Heartbreak is how we mature
心碎让我们长大成人。
rupture n. 破裂
render sb + adj. 使某人处于...的状态
A rupture of the heart that had rendered him hopeless about the possibility of happiness in love
父母离婚的心痛让小Gustav对爱情和快乐不抱希望。
[第五段]
On their following walk, he revisits the subject. In a sentiment that calls to mind John Steinbeck’s（斯坦贝克） unforgettable advice on love — “If it is right, it happens,” he counseled his lovestruck teenage son. *“The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” *— Kafka tells young Gustav:
Patience is the master key to every situation. One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing… There is no such thing as bending or breaking. It’s a question only of overcoming, which begins with overcoming oneself. That cannot be avoided. To abandon that path is always to break in pieces. One must patiently accept everything and let it grow within oneself. The barriers of the fear-ridden I can only be broken by love. One must, in the dead leaves that rustle around one, already see the young fresh green of spring, compose oneself in patience, and wait. Patience is the only true foundation on which to make one’s dreams come true.
需要掌握的单词：
patience n. 耐心
master key 万能钥匙
sympathy n. 同情心
surrender vt. 投降
forbearing adj. 忍耐的
overcome vt. 克服
Patience is the master key to every situation.
耐心是把通往成功的万能钥匙。
One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing.
你要对万物怀有悲悯之心，你要向万物臣服，但是与此同时，你要保有耐心，坚韧不拔。
There is no such thing as bending or breaking. It’s a question only of overcoming, which begins with overcoming oneself.
你既不会屈服，也不会被摧毁，你要做的就是排除万难，但是先要战胜的，是你自己。
[第六段]
Conversations with Kafka is a trove of often dark, sometimes radiant, always profound insight from one of the most complex and compelling minds humanity has produced. Complement this particular portion with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn on how to love and Milan Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love.
Kafka’s Beautiful and Heartbreaking Love Letters
原文链接：
[第一段]
“Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences,” a wise woman once said, echoing Rilke’s memorable proclamation that love is “perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” When we fall in love, we are asked to rise to this task — a polarizing pull that stretches the psyche in opposite directions as we crave surrender and safety in equal measure.
[第二段]
The discomfort of this wildly disorienting bidirectional pull is what 29-year-old Franz Kafka articulated in a beautiful and heartbreaking letter to Felice Bauer, a marketing rep for a dictation machine company whom the young author had met at the home of his friend and future biographer Max Brod in August of 1912. Young Franz and Felice immediately began a correspondence of escalating intensity, with Kafka frequently exasperated — as was Vladimir Nabokov at the start of his lifelong romance with Véra — over his beloved’s infrequent and insufficiently romantic response. Over the five-year course of their turbulent, mostly epistolary relationship, they were engaged twice, even though they met in person only a few times. During that period, Kafka produced his most significant work, including The Metamorphosis. Five hundred of his letters survive and were posthumously published in the intensely rewarding and revelatory Letters to Felice (public library).
[第三段]
In November of 1912, three months after he met Felice, Kafka writes:
Fräulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?
[第四段]
Whether out of self-protective rationalization or mere pragmatism — the onset of tuberculosis was, after all, what ended the relationship five years later — he plaintively points to a physiological reason, almost as an excuse for the psychological:
Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not doing so. To make it short: 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.
[第五段]
He resumes his plea, which seems directed more at himself than at her:
If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise. Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with what energy remains to me at the end of this letter…
[第六段]
He closes in true Kafkaesque fashion:
If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.
[第七段]
It makes sense, of course, for a man who associated pleasure with pain — nowhere more vividly than in his famous proclamation that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” — to experience love as at once elating and anguishing. But the paradox of love is perhaps the same as that of art, which Jeanette Winterson so elegantly termed “the paradox of active surrender” — in order for either to transform us, we must let it turn us over and inside-out. That is what Rilke called love’s great exacting claim, and in that claim lies its ultimate reward.
Kafka on Love and Patience
原文链接：
“Patience is the master key to every situation. One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing.”
[第一段]
One March morning in 1920, a Czech teenager named Gustav Janouch arrived at the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institution, where his father worked. The purpose of the visit was for the seventeen-year-old aspiring poet to meet his father’s famous colleague, Metamorphosis author Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924), who had been laboring at the insurance company for twelve years. The two struck an unlikely friendship and for the remaining four years of Kafka’s life, they frequently shared long walks through the city, talking about literature and life.
[第二段]
In 1951, long after Kafka’s death, Janouch published his recollection of these remarkably rich walking talks as Conversations with Kafka (public library).What makes these conversations so compelling is that much of what is said counters the familiar image of Kafka as a creature of grievance and gloom. Perhaps because we are constantly entraining each other through conversation and the young man’s openhearted optimism awakened dormant parts of Kafka’s spirit, there is radiance in a great deal of what they discuss — art (“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”), poetry (“Goethe says practically everything that matters to us human beings.”), and love.
[第三段]
In reflecting on the anguish of ill-fated love affairs, Kafka offers a magnificent definition of love and its hazards, at once utterly elevating and utterly grounding:
What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
[第四段]
Far more often than we like to imagine, those problems can steer the car toward a crash. Kafka himself was intimately familiar with heartbreak, as evidenced by his beautiful and harrowing love letters. But perhaps because “heartbreak is how we mature,” his own experience is what allowed the author to offer young Gustav such strangely assuring advice in comforting the Gustav’s distress over his parents’ divorce — a rupture of the heart that had rendered him hopeless about the possibility of happiness in love. Echoing Nietzsche’s belief that a fulfilling life requires embracing difficulty, Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
[第五段]
On their following walk, he revisits the subject. In a sentiment that calls to mind John Steinbeck’s unforgettable advice on love — “If it is right, it happens,” he counseled his lovestruck teenage son. “The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” — Kafka tells young Gustav:
Patience is the master key to every situation. One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing… There is no such thing as bending or breaking. It’s a question only of overcoming, which begins with overcoming oneself. That cannot be avoided. To abandon that path is always to break in pieces. One must patiently accept everything and let it grow within oneself. The barriers of the fear-ridden I can only be broken by love. One must, in the dead leaves that rustle around one, already see the young fresh green of spring, compose oneself in patience, and wait. Patience is the only true foundation on which to make one’s dreams come true.
[第六段]
Conversations with Kafka is a trove of often dark, sometimes radiant, always profound insight from one of the most complex and compelling minds humanity has produced. Complement this particular portion with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn on how to love and Milan Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love.