Without Lifting A Finger

Here he's writing to Grete Bloch again (she's been experiencing some dental pain): However, there is no doubt in my mind that a draft doesn't cause toothache in healthy teeth. Healthy teeth don't even begin to feel well until they are exposed to a draft. And if the deterioration of the teeth wasn't actually due to inadequate care, then it was due, as with me, to eating meat. One sits at table laughing and talking (for me at least there is the justification that I neither laugh nor talk), and meanwhile tiny shreds of meat between the teeth produce germs of decay and fermentation no less than a dead rat squashed between two stones.

Don't know how many letters he wrote to Grete. She was apparently a friend of Felice's, sent to Prague to somehow act as a go-between. The introduction sheds very little light on her, and there isn't much on the Net. It's possible that Grete and Kafka "commingled" (Grete has a mysterious son--the "timing" makes it possible that he was Kafka's, but the intro seems to lean on the side of "he wasn't"--who later dies at age 7). Though there seems to be some uncertainty re her later fate, Grete apparently dies in the camps.  *** I was expecting to meet (after all, I knew nothing about you except that you were efficient) an elderly spinster with maternal feelings who, moreover -- I don't quite know why -- would be tall and strong. To this kind of girl, I thought, one might really be able to confess everything, which in itself would be a blessing, and perhaps one might get some good advice (the belief that an adult is capa...