Kafka on Love and Patience

“Patience is the master key to every situation. One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything, but at the same time remain patient and forbearing.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

One March morning in 1920, a Czech teenager named Gustav Janouch arrived at the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institution, where his father worked. The purpose of the visit was for the seventeen-year-old aspiring poet to meet his father’s famous colleague,Metamorphosis author Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924), who had been laboring at the insurance company for twelve years. The two struck an unlikely friendship and for the remaining four years of Kafka’s life, they frequently shared long walks through the city, talking about literature and life.

In 1951, long after Kafka’s death, Janouch published his recollection of these remarkably rich walking talks as Conversations with Kafka (public library).

What makes these conversations so compelling is that much of what is said counters the familiar image of Kafka as a creature of grievance and gloom. Perhaps because we are constantly entraining each other through conversation and the young man’s openhearted optimism awakened dormant parts of Kafka’s spirit, there is radiance in a great deal of what they discuss — art (“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”), poetry (“Goethe says practically everything that matters to us human beings.”), and love.

In reflecting on the anguish of ill-fated love affairs, Kafka offers a magnificent definition of love and its hazards, at once utterly elevating and utterly grounding:

What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.

Far more often than we like to imagine, those problems can steer the car toward a crash. Kafka himself was intimately familiar with heartbreak, as evidenced by hisbeautiful and harrowing love letters. But perhaps because “heartbreak is how we mature,” his own experience is what allowed the author to offer young Gustav such strangely assuring advice in comforting the Gustav’s distress over his parents’ divorce — a rupture of the heart that had rendered him hopeless about the possibility of happiness in love. Echoing Nietzsche’s belief that a fulfilling life requires embracing difficulty, Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:…

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https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/22/conversations-with-kafka-love-patience/

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