Metadata
- Author: Maria Popova
- Full Title: Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection
- URL: https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/17/kafka-on-friendship/
Highlights
- Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic notion of anam cara. We bring this knowledge, this mutual understanding, to every interaction with a true friend — that is what makes friendship satisfying, steadying, safe; it is what makes it, in Kahlil Gibran’s immortal words, a “field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.” And yet, if we are alive enough, each time we meet we are meeting for the first time, getting to know each other afresh, for only the self that goes on changing goes on living. (View Highlight)
- Another paradox: It is often the loneliest people, those most riven by self-doubt and most unsure of where they belong, that make the most steadfast and salutary friends once they break through the barriers of insecurity and fear to allow connection. Because for them the gift of being understood is especially hard-earned, they give it back redoubled with gratitude. Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) was one such person. (View Highlight)
- “Am I broken?” he asks on the pages of Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal in which he grappled so desperately with self-doubt — and answers himself: “Almost nothing but hope speaks against it.” When his hope dwindled, he declared himself “unfit for friendship,” doubted whether friendship is “even possible” for someone as strange and solitary as himself, and yet he yearned for it: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person.” (View Highlight)
- In a particularly dispirited diary entry from the last year of his thirties, which was also one of the last years of his life, he declares himself “forsaken” and writes:
[I am] incapable of striking up a friendship with anyone, incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together. (View Highlight)
- It takes just one unwavering friend — a friend to the soul beneath the self that does the doubting — to quietly and consistently revise these punishing stories we tell ourselves. All along, through all the years of all this punishing self-talk, Kafka’s childhood friend Max Brod had been the greatest champion of his talent, never losing faith in his friend or in the friendship. Though Kafka frequently withdrew into his self-elected isolation, Max never withdrew his love. (View Highlight)
- With time, Kafka came to understand that in every friendship, life happens and interrupts the continuity of connection, making it difficult to reconnect — difficult but infinitely important, for in moving through the difficulty of discontinuity, in the repair of the rupture, the deeper substratum of trust and durability is laid down and reaffirmed again and again. (View Highlight)
- Like all deep and complex people, Kafka was not fully aware of the reasons for his frequent withdrawals. But some part of him hoped, trusted that true friendship withstands the elasticity of presence. When he finally realized that the tuberculosis he had been living with for years was going to take his life, he left all his papers and manuscripts to Max, instructing him to destroy everything. In an act of love — refusing to enable a friend’s damaging self-doubt is always an act of love — Max disobeyed, instead preserving Kafka’s writing for posterity, publishing a tender biography of his friend, and immortalizing their friendship in his 1928 novel The Kingdom of Love. (View Highlight)