Letter from Franz Kafka: Jerry Covey

Posted At : January 6, 2009 1:00 AM
Related Categories: Personal Narratives

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Taken from a January 27, 1904 letter in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors by Franz Kafka, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, published by Schocken Books.

Contributed by Mark Zimmermann of the Washington, D.C. area. Read by Jerry Covey: "Our minds need exercise, just as our bodies do. We need to be challenged with new information that forces us to continually reconcile our understanding of ourselves. The following quote illustrates my point." Jerry Covey is an Anchorage-based consultant who specializes in working with non-profit organizations. His services include planning, communications training, leadership development, and mutual gains bargaining. Jerry's website.

In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka wrote:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy...? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief."

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