Edward Hirsch
Milena Jesenska
Thank you for attending this tribute to love.
I present myself to you as a Czech journalist
and translator—and also as a modern woman
who has recognized the cruelty of our century.
Thus far it has been a calamitous century;
I haven't lost my vital optimism as a woman
or my curiosity as a practicing journalist,
but tonight's lecture is an obituary for love
because Franz Kafka—the writer—has died.
He was a master of the alienated sentence,
a Jew, a jackdaw, a cauldron of anxiety,
a crisis masquerading as a human body.
He never should have entertained a body
since it caused him overwhelming anxiety
which he transformed into a guilty sentence
that turned on itself and would never die.
Kafka saw a strange and terrifying world
filled with invisible wingbeats and demons.
He suffered for years from a lung disease
which he also encouraged by his thinking.
He had his own gruesome way of thinking
about the dark receptivity of his disease:
he viewed his lungs as a cradle for demons
who would tear apart and destroy his world.
I suspect he was too vulnerable to live,
too kind to fight. He had a frightening
delicacy, an uncompromising refinement.
Few people ever knew him as a human being
because he was such an odd, solitary being.
The books he wrote have great refinement—
I find them stark, funny, and frightening.
Is it possible he knew too much to live?
He had nothing to do with earthly business—
strangeness came through everything he said.
For him money, typewriters, foreign exchange
were mysterious secrets, mystical things
he couldn't cope with, manage or change.
Thus he admired his fiancee, so he said,
because she was very "good at business"
and therefore a true person of the world.
When I told him about my husband, Ernst,
who was unfaithful to me a hundred times,
his face lit up with genuine amazement.
It was the same awe—the same amazement—
he felt for conductors who knew the times
of all the trains. He was completely earnest
in his respect for those who run the world.
He was a naked man trying to live alone
in a universe were everyone was dressed.
He had no refuge from the elements, exposed
to those things from which we are protected.
He was lost because he was unprotected,
a human negative who had been exposed.
I supposed his terror could be addressed,
but night was a blankness he faced alone.
No sanatorium could possibly cure him
because he never recovered from his fear
of living like an insignificant cockroach
sacrificed on the altar of the abnormal.
But what if we are sick and he was normal?
He perceived the courage of the cockroach
who crawls in the dust and encounters fear.
The darkness was a mirror reflecting him.
I admit I needed him. I tried to help,
but my love turned into one more catastrophe.
I have his letters, diaries, stories
that scrutinize an inscrutable disaster.
Maybe his character was a human disaster,
but he paid for it with uncanny stories
Which will survive the coming catastrophe.
And now we must live without his help.
Edward Hirsch, On Love, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.