Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Valentine's Day

Franz Kafka writes a "love" letter, according to The Atlantic:
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it.
But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat.
But the beating didn’t help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire.
In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved.
But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms.
But here too the uncertainty of trans mutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone’s arms.
Assuming, of course, it is a love letter, it may be the single greatest love letter ever written in that it makes little in the way of overt sense and its meaning rests almost entirely on the reader's response, which suggests that love, much like beauty, is the the eye of the beholder.

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