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" Getting to know someone is inconceivably difficult ."

Franz Kafka wrote a series of letters to Milena Jesenská, a young woman who translated some of his stories into Czech.
They met only two or three times, but as the letters that have reached us reveal, the connection between the two was strong. Milena’s answers are mostly lost, but we may sense some of them from Kafka’s letters. They offer a valuable insight into the inner world of the writer.
From these letters, he emerges as someone tormented by insomnia, severe bouts of coughing, fears of himself, of people and of life. Kafka shares his almost despairing hopes and shattered expectations with Milena.
The writer predicts that their relationship will be coming to an end soon. Too many things divide them. Milena is married and lives in Vienna. Kafka lives in Prague, and he is not free too. Anxiety and fears are his constant companions.
If one decided to count the frequency of the words that these letters contain, "fear" would probably be the most frequent one.
"...the only certainty is that I cannot live apart from you without completely submitting to fear, giving it even more than it demands, and I do this voluntarily, with delight, I pour myself into it."
Kafka even proposes a definition of "fear".

Of course one cannot even figure out one’s own riddles; this is precisely the meaning of “fear.�

Franz longs for her attention, begs Milena to answer his letters, and occasionally tries to give her some advice regarding her health. In some letters, he attempts to bring her to accept financial help.
Kafka’s letters combine the feeling of loneliness, which seems to ooze from his words, with a certain sense of self-sufficiency, albeit peculiar or Kafkaesque, if you will.
On occasion, Kafka dares not open her letters. He may leave them lying on the table unopened and wait a couple of days before approaching them.
Perhaps, the writer did not feel ready for such intense feelings hidden in these letters.
Too much happiness, as well as too much sadness, could be devastating.

According to Franz, exchanging letters touches on the intersection of the ordinary with the mystical and transcendental. Kafka highlights the point in an impressive manner:

Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.

My personal experience with reading private letters never intended for the public is somewhat ambivalent.
Through letters we get the vicarious experience of a distant time and place. I appreciate their quality of spontaneity, a degree of sincerity that is often present, and the opportunity to learn firsthand about the past.
At the same time, reading letters sometimes evokes in me a strange feeling, as if I were inadvertently spying on their authors who are long gone or, to put it less bluntly, as if I were entering uncharted territory without being invited.
Such was the case with Kafka’s letters to Milena.
However, the one thing that I find more challenging than reading such personal texts is reviewing them. Therefore, I had better stop rambling and give the floor to Kafka.

Here are a few excerpts from the collection of letters.
(view spoiler)["Yesterday I advised you not to write me every day, I still hold the same opinion today and it would be very good for both of us, and so I repeat my advice today even more emphatically—only please, Milena, don’t listen to me, and write me every day anyway, it can even be very brief, briefer than today’s letters, just 2 lines, just one, just one word, but if I had to go without them I would suffer terribly."
"Perhaps the logical conclusion is that we’re both married: you in Vienna, I to my fear in Prague, in which case you’re not the only one tugging in vain at marriage. For you see, Milena, if you had been completely convinced by me in Vienna (even agreeing to take that step of which you were unsure), you would no longer be in Vienna in spite of everything: or rather in that case there would not be any 'in spite of everything' —you’d simply be in Prague."
"So we’ve drifted apart entirely, Milena, and the only thing we seem to share is the intense wish that you were here, and your face as close to me as possible. And of course we also share this death wish—this wish to die 'comfortably,' but in reality that is a wish small children have anyway, like myself for instance, during arithmetic: I would see the teacher leafing through his notebook, probably looking for my name, and would compare my inconceivable lack of knowledge to this spectacle of power, terror, and reality."
"If we would consciously confront marriage before embarking on it, we would become aware of certain things we generally don’t think about. For instance, that living together is not only easier, but also harder than living alone. Life alone has many compensations for the loneliness: half the responsibility or twice the freedom or independence or even the possibility of traveling to Australia. But marriage is difficult because, starting the moment one binds oneself, one must renounce everything—in the deepest meaning of the word—that marriage does not offer." (hide spoiler)]

Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.

Recommended to those who love the novels of Kafka and are interested in his personality.