Milena on Kafka

Finished with Kafka and Felice. He gets diagnosed with tuberculosis toward the end of the correspondence. Was sort of in between texts (still am but I think I'll return to Strindberg), so I read the appendices of the Letters to Milena (I've read the letters thrice but my new Kindle version included some extra goodies: some letters from Milena to Max Brod, some of Milena's articles/essays, and the obit she wrote for Kafka).

These bits are from letters Milena wrote to Max:

I really was very shocked; I didn't know that Franz's illness was so serious -- he was really quite healthy here, I didn't hear him cough at all, he was bright and cheerful and slept well.

He doesn't understand the simplest things in the world. Were you ever in a post office with him? After he composes a telegram and picks out whatever little counter he likes best, shaking his head, he then drifts from one counter to another, without the slightest idea to what end or why, until he finally stumbles on the right one, and when he pays and receives change, he counts it and discovers one krone too many, and so he gives one back to the girl behind the counter. Then he walks away slowly, counts once again, and in the middle of descending the last staircase he realizes that the missing krone belong to him after all. So there you stand next to him, at a loss, while he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, wondering what to do.

 A person who can type quickly and a man who has four mistresses are just as incomprehensible to him as the krone at the post office and the krone with the beggar; they are incomprehensible to him because they are alive. But Frank is unable to live. Frank isn't capable of living. Frank will never recover. Frank will soon die.

I was incapable of leaving my husband, and perhaps I was too much a woman to have the strength to subject myself to a life that I knew would demand the most rigorous asceticism, for the rest of my days. I have, however, an insuppressible longing, a maniacal longing for a completely different life than the one I am leading now or ever will lead, a longing for a life with a child, for a life that would be very close to the earth. And this is what probably won out over everything else inside me, over love, over my love of taking flight, over my admiration, and once again over love.