Noel’s Reviews > Letters to Milena > Status Update
Noel
is 16% done
“It has always seemed quite incomprehensible to me when someone got entangled with me, and I have destroyed several human relationships (that for instance with Weiss) from a logical disposition of mind that always believed more in an error of the other person than in miracles (at least so far as I was concerned).�
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— Sep 18, 2024 10:39AM
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is 98% done
“[L]iving authors have a living connection with their books. With their very existence they fight for or against them. The real independent life of the book begins only after the death of the writer, or, more correctly, some time after his death, for these eager men still go on fighting awhile for their book beyond their death. Then, however, it is alone and can rely only on the strength of its own heartbeat.�
— Oct 15, 2024 06:33PM
Noel
is 92% done
“[A]ll the time I’m trying to convey something unconveyable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell of something which I have in my bones and which can be experienced only in these bones. Fundamentally it’s perhaps nothing but that fear of which we have already talked so often, but fear extended to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest—�
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— Oct 15, 2024 12:51PM
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Noel
is 92% done
“You say, Milena, that you don’t understand it. Try to understand it by calling it illness. It’s one of the many manifestations of illness which psychoanalysis believes it has uncovered. I don’t call it illness and I consider the therapeutic part of psychoanalysis to be a hopeless error. All these so-called illnesses, sad as they may appear, are matters of faith,�
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— Oct 15, 2024 12:35PM
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Noel
is 91% done
“Yes, torturing is extremely important to me, I’m preoccupied with nothing but being tortured and torturing. � The stupidity inherent in this (realization of stupidity doesn’t help) I once expressed as follows: “The animal wrenches the whip from the master and whips itself so as to become master, and doesn’t realize…�
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— Oct 15, 2024 12:15PM
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Noel
is 89% done
“I’ve spent all afternoon in the streets, wallowing in the Jew-baiting. “Prasivé plemeno”—“filthy rabble� I heard someone call the Jews the other day. Isn’t it the natural thing to leave the place where one is hated so much? (For this, Zionism or national feeling is not needed.) The heroism which consists of staying on in spite of it all is that of cockroaches…�
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— Oct 15, 2024 11:55AM
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Noel
is 89% done
“I’m reading a Chinese book, “bubácká kniha�. I mention it because it’s concerned exclusively with death. A man lies on his death-bed and in the independence given him by the proximity of death, he says: “I’ve spent my life trying to fight lust and to put an end to it.� Then a pupil mocks his teacher who speaks of nothing but death:�
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— Oct 15, 2024 11:42AM
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Noel
is 85% done
“Lonely imperfection has to be endured through every moment, imperfection shared by two does not have to be endured. Hasn’t one got eyes to tear them out and a heart for the same purpose? And yet it isn’t so bad, it’s all an exaggeration and a lie, everything is an exaggeration, only the longing is true, this cannot be exaggerated.�
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— Oct 14, 2024 09:37PM
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Noel
is 78% done
“I’m dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, which is why I make so much fuss about purity. No people sing with such pure voices as those who live in deepest hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.�
— Oct 14, 2024 07:35PM
Noel
is 66% done
I can’t help wondering what Kafka’s feelings would be on Zionism today. I guess simply being able to understand the question would completely change his life�
“I won’t meddle in the fight between you and Max [Brod, always an active Zionist]. I stand aside, see each one’s point of view, and am safe. You are undoubtedly right in what you say, but now we are changing places.�
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— Oct 13, 2024 08:45PM
“I won’t meddle in the fight between you and Max [Brod, always an active Zionist]. I stand aside, see each one’s point of view, and am safe. You are undoubtedly right in what you say, but now we are changing places.�
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Noel
is 48% done
“Once as a very small boy I was given a Sechserl [a ten-Kreuzer piece during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy] and felt a great urge to hand it to an old beggar woman who sat between the Grosse and the Kleine Ring. But the sum seemed to me enormous, a sum which probably never before and been given to a beggar, so I was ashamed in front of the beggar woman to do something so unheard-of…�
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— Oct 11, 2024 09:25PM
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Noel
(last edited Sep 18, 2024 10:49AM)
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Sep 18, 2024 10:40AM
“Why, I wondered, trouble the already troubled water of life still further with such things. I see a stretch of possible road ahead of me and realize what an enormous, for me almost unattainable distance I must travel from my present position before I’ll be worthy of an occasional glance (even from myself, how much more from others!—this is not modesty but conceit, if you think it over)—and now I receive your letters, Milena. How shall I express the difference? A man lies in the filth and stench of his deathbed and there comes the angel of death, the most beatific of all angels, and looks at him. Can this man so much as dare to die? He turns over, hides himself even deeper in his bed, he’s incapable of dying. In short : I don’t believe what you say, Milena, and there’s no way in which it could be proved to me—nor could anyone have proved it to Dostoevsky during that night, and my life lasts one night—it could be proved only by myself, I can imagine myself capable of it (in the same way as you once had the vision of the man on the deck-chair) but I can’t believe it of myself.�
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