“Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts”

I love texting. Texts are a constant companion for me – quick check-ins, official work, deep chats late in the night, banter in the family groups are all various forms of texting that I (and probably all of us?) indulge in. At times, I get melancholic when I realize that texts are going to be the primary medium through which I’m going to communicate with all the significant people in my life. No matter how often I meet them in person, nothing will come close to the sheer amount of time we’ll spend together through messages on a screen.

I’ve been reading a bit of Kafka over the past few weeks and came across one of his letters to his darling Milena. In it, he writes about his irritation with the medium of letters and how inadequate they are to express his true love for her. It probably has one of the most memorable lines in all of literature. The letter reproduced here is worth a read (note the text in bold):

It’s a long time since I wrote to you, Frau Milena, and even today I’m writing only as the result of an incident. Actually, I don’t have to apologize for my not writing, you know after all how I hate letters. All the misfortune of my life-I don’t wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark – derives, one could say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters.

 People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always-and as a matter of fact not only those of other people, but my own.

In my case this is a special misfortune of which I won’t say more, but at the same time also a general one. The easy possibility of letter-writing must-seen merely theoretically-have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter ! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength.

Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

“Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts” , “The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish. “

Milena, like most of Kafka’s family and acquaintances, perished in a concentration camp of Hitler. She was 48. Kafka never lived to see this tragedy. Tuberculosis finished him off before Hitler’s rise.

Kafka and Milena – Image Source