Life's Splendor

"Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come." (18 October 1921)

                     — from The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923 




Love brings people together and it is natural when one expresses  a dying wish to burn their writing, should  you listen?
Should love make us obey the lover, always?

  Kafka requested that his lover destroy his short stories and novels.  His fiancee  obeyed and burned his works, but his best friend Max Brod did not.

In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to escape from his paternal family and devote himself to writing. In Berlin he found new hope in the companionship of a young Jewish socialist, Dora Dymant, but his stay was cut short by a decisive deterioration of his health during the winter of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dora Dymant joined him, he died in a clinic near Vienna.

He died of tuberculosis of the lungs and larynx on June 3, 1924, a month before his forty-first birthday. Dora, inconsolable, whispers for days afterward, “My love, my love, my good one . . .”

Kafka's Last Love