Letters to Milena
The present times of planes falling, summers boiling and missiles raining hold more relevance to Kafka's words than the last century in which he wrote them. The world today feels no less absurd, alienating or fragile. We scroll past devastation. We swipe through affection. We ghost and are ghosted. We fear being seen, yet ache to be known.
In an age when love is often reduced to emojis and double-taps, Franz Kafka's Letters to Milena remind us of a time when affection was poured out in ink — raw, desperate and undiluted. These letters, written between 1920 and 1923 to Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská, are a series of writings drenched in pain, longing and the unbearable beauty of unfulfilled connection.
Ironically, I found myself reading those letters as missiles began hitting West Asia. Nuclear threats loom, not as far-off fears but as tangible possibilities. World powers posture like overlords in some modern-day Coliseum, eager to turn suffering into spectacle. Like the ancient Athenians who gathered to watch men battle lions, today's empires orchestrate chaos while calling it order, watching as others bleed for the illusion of control.
In such a world, Kafka's Letters to Milena are not relics. They are warnings, mirrors and prayers. They remind us that love - real love - is not a product of convenience, but of vulnerability. In an age of curated affection and filtered expression, Kafka's unfiltered voice still echoes: fragile, trembling, and all too real.
Kafka's life was steeped in suffering — not just physical, but psychological, emotional and existential. His pain wasn't dramatic in a public sense, but rather quiet, internal and corrosive - the kind that slowly shapes a writer's voice into something unforgettable.
Kafka suffered from tuberculosis, which he battled for the last decade of his life. The disease caused him immense physical pain and weight loss, and eventually made it impossible for him to eat solid food. But this bodily suffering was just one layer of a deeper torment. Kafka's health struggles seemed to mirror his emotional landscape: fragile, wasting unhealed.
If Kafka were to write to Milena today, he would talk about drones killing children and bombs turning weddings into hellfire. Yet, he would tell Melina, perhaps in his signature style, that "Millions of years away, bigger than thousands of worlds, even these stars are smaller than the happiness; my heart feels upon seeing you."
The hopeful in him would tell the young ones always to have a legacy, must plant trees, write books and have children that could outlive them. He would also tell them art can sometimes live longer than scientific weapons, nuclear installations and warhead-carrying missiles.
Kafka's emotional fragility coexisted with his intellectual brilliance. The letters are littered with insight, self-deprecation and poetic reflection. "Writing letters is an intercourse with ghosts," he muses, lamenting the inability of language to truly bridge the distance between two souls. Yet paradoxically, he keeps writing — feverishly, helplessly — as if the act of writing itself is survival.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of Kafka's relationship with Milena is not its doomed romance, but the distance that never closed. His love was always mediated — by paper, ink, illness, time and fear. In one letter, he writes: "You are always so far away — that is the worst thing. The longing." It's a haunting line that speaks to the universal ache of loving someone just out of reach.
One hundred years later, in an era obsessed with speed and superficial connection, Kafka's letters stand as a quiet rebellion — an argument for depth over ease, authenticity over efficiency, and longing over possession. They teach us that some of the most profound love stories are not the ones that end in happy homes, but the ones that never quite begin. Kafka died in 1924. Milena died two decades later in a Nazi concentration camp. Their letters remain. And so does the longing.
Kafka's suffering wasn't the kind that screams — it whispers. And perhaps that's why it still reaches us, so intimately, a century later.
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Letters to Milena
Listen to article The present times of planes falling, summers boiling and missiles raining hold more relevance to Kafka's words than the last century in which he wrote them. The world today feels no less absurd, alienating or fragile. We scroll past devastation. We swipe through affection. We ghost and are ghosted. We fear being seen, yet ache to be known. In an age when love is often reduced to emojis and double-taps, Franz Kafka's Letters to Milena remind us of a time when affection was poured out in ink — raw, desperate and undiluted. These letters, written between 1920 and 1923 to Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská, are a series of writings drenched in pain, longing and the unbearable beauty of unfulfilled connection. Ironically, I found myself reading those letters as missiles began hitting West Asia. Nuclear threats loom, not as far-off fears but as tangible possibilities. World powers posture like overlords in some modern-day Coliseum, eager to turn suffering into spectacle. Like the ancient Athenians who gathered to watch men battle lions, today's empires orchestrate chaos while calling it order, watching as others bleed for the illusion of control. In such a world, Kafka's Letters to Milena are not relics. They are warnings, mirrors and prayers. They remind us that love - real love - is not a product of convenience, but of vulnerability. In an age of curated affection and filtered expression, Kafka's unfiltered voice still echoes: fragile, trembling, and all too real. Kafka's life was steeped in suffering — not just physical, but psychological, emotional and existential. His pain wasn't dramatic in a public sense, but rather quiet, internal and corrosive - the kind that slowly shapes a writer's voice into something unforgettable. Kafka suffered from tuberculosis, which he battled for the last decade of his life. The disease caused him immense physical pain and weight loss, and eventually made it impossible for him to eat solid food. But this bodily suffering was just one layer of a deeper torment. Kafka's health struggles seemed to mirror his emotional landscape: fragile, wasting unhealed. If Kafka were to write to Milena today, he would talk about drones killing children and bombs turning weddings into hellfire. Yet, he would tell Melina, perhaps in his signature style, that "Millions of years away, bigger than thousands of worlds, even these stars are smaller than the happiness; my heart feels upon seeing you." The hopeful in him would tell the young ones always to have a legacy, must plant trees, write books and have children that could outlive them. He would also tell them art can sometimes live longer than scientific weapons, nuclear installations and warhead-carrying missiles. Kafka's emotional fragility coexisted with his intellectual brilliance. The letters are littered with insight, self-deprecation and poetic reflection. "Writing letters is an intercourse with ghosts," he muses, lamenting the inability of language to truly bridge the distance between two souls. Yet paradoxically, he keeps writing — feverishly, helplessly — as if the act of writing itself is survival. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of Kafka's relationship with Milena is not its doomed romance, but the distance that never closed. His love was always mediated — by paper, ink, illness, time and fear. In one letter, he writes: "You are always so far away — that is the worst thing. The longing." It's a haunting line that speaks to the universal ache of loving someone just out of reach. One hundred years later, in an era obsessed with speed and superficial connection, Kafka's letters stand as a quiet rebellion — an argument for depth over ease, authenticity over efficiency, and longing over possession. They teach us that some of the most profound love stories are not the ones that end in happy homes, but the ones that never quite begin. Kafka died in 1924. Milena died two decades later in a Nazi concentration camp. Their letters remain. And so does the longing. Kafka's suffering wasn't the kind that screams — it whispers. And perhaps that's why it still reaches us, so intimately, a century later.
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On April 22, nearly two and a half years after Joan Didion's death, a slim but arresting volume titled Notes to John appeared on shelves. Published by Knopf, the collection comprises fragments: personal memos, tender jottings, reminders to herself, and letters addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, after his death in 2003. In true Didion style, even her unfinished, offhand scraps shimmer with clarity and literary precision. But reading Notes to John is a disquieting experience: you are tugged in close, into the bone of her grief, and yet held at arm's length. It is as if you've found someone's diary under their pillow and, despite knowing better, can't stop turning the pages. That tug-of-war between public and private, between a writer's legacy and their consent, is the central tension in publishing a dead person's notebooks. It's a literary act and a voyeuristic one. Notes to John may be the catalyst, but the phenomenon is hardly new. 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Their editor is often a family member, a literary executor, or a publisher with contractual rights but not always moral ones. Shaun Usher's Lists of Note and More Lists of Note anthologise lists written by the famous and the long-dead: Da Vinci's shopping notes, Marilyn Monroe's acting prep, Isaac Newton's sins, presented with curatorial glee. They're fascinating, yes, but they also decontextualise deeply personal documents into coffee-table curiosities. Dead men do tell tales In Kafka's case, the betrayal was flagrant. He instructed his friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts. Brod didn't, and the result is that much of Kafka's genius, The Trial, The Castle, his heartbreaking letters to Milena and Felice, came to light only after his death. Without that breach of trust, there would be no Kafka in the canon. So was Brod wrong? Legally, no. Literarily, certainly not. Ethically? Well. Virginia Woolf's diaries and letters were curated posthumously first by her husband Leonard Woolf, and then by his nephew, Quentin Bell. Leonard admitted to cutting large swathes of material. Her personality, her flirtations, her frustrations with the Bloomsbury crowd, these only surfaced in later, more complete editions. Each round of publication brought her closer to her readers and arguably farther from the version of herself she wanted to project. We are reading a Woolf curated by Leonard, filtered through edits and omissions; we are mourning a Didion arranged by her editor, not by Didion herself. The issue at hand is not just literary but legal. The ownership of the "self" after death falls into ambiguous hands, sometimes the estate, sometimes the publisher, sometimes the reader's projection. In Didion's case, her longtime editor Shelley Wanger helped assemble the notes, presumably with care and intention. 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Grief, nostalgia, even a stray sentence from a dead woman to her dead husband all become subject to claims, though they resist easy commodification. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote about keeping John's shoes after he died, irrationally believing he might need them. Notes to John feels like an extension of that magical thinking, a belief that speaking to the dead can somehow keep them present, or that reading their words might bring them back. Yet publishing such words transforms a private ritual into a public spectacle. The dynamics of posthumous publication often benefit publishers, estates, and readers, while consent from the author remains absent. As readers, we inherit both the privilege and the burden of that imbalance. We are owed nothing, and yet we often take everything. To read Notes to John is to be moved, but also to be implicated. The dead may not speak for themselves, but they wrote. That, sometimes, must be enough.
