Boundless Entries

If this letter had a soundtrack I think “My Father’s House” by Bruce Springsteen would be a strong contender. I probably listened to this on repeat for a good few hours while reading parts of the letter. I imagine Kafka sitting at his desk half smiling half bleeding onto paper from the memories he had saved of his father and mother. Bruce Springsteen’s slow and almost meditative account of seeing or walking towards his father’s house feels almost like Kafka’s detailed yet condesnsed childhood story which he eloquently fits into 47 pages. I’m not trying to convince anyone of adopting this as the main soundtrack but it stuck with me that at a concert in 1990, this is how Springsteen introduced this song:

[“I had this habit for a long time: I used to get in my car and drive back through my old neighborhood in the town I grew up in. I’d always drive past the old houses that I used to live in, sometimes late at night. I got so I would do it really regularly – two, three, four times a week for years.

I eventually got to wondering, “What the hell am I doing?”

So, I went to see the psychiatrist, I said, “Doc, for years I’ve been getting in my car and driving past my old houses late at night. What am I doing?”

He said, “I want you to tell me what you think you’re doing.”

I go,”That’s what I’m paying you for.”

He said, “Well, something bad happened and you’re going back thinking you can make it right again. Something went wrong and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.” I sat there, and I said, “That is what I’m doing.”

He said, “Well, you can’t.”

And here I imagine thirty-six year old Kafka trying to heal through the grievances of a childhood which he hints between the lines could have been different yet with no one to blame.

From the song lyrics: “The branches and brambles tore my clothes and scratched my arms but I ran till I fell shaking in his arms”

“I woke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart”

Branches and brambles in my mind as a metaphor to the sarcastic yet hurtful comments that Kafka’s father threw at him mercilessly and the 47 page explanatory letter being his run towards his father and the fall in his arms – yet shaking with fear like he always had.

“A woman I didn’t recognize came and spoke to me through a chained door” listening to this part, in my head, felt like Kafka’s mom who never delievred his letter to his father and who had changed over the years to go from the one person who balanced his childhood to growing more and more like his father however, silently and gently in her disappointment.

The examples Kafka gave whether it was events or quotes fired by his father towards him or towards other people have the ability to consume you whole. Nothing prepared me for the heaviness of the emotional abuse he had endured. I’ve read many books and stories that carried such abuse, yet Kafka’s account, although written at thirty-six years old felt like a child’s cry all the way through. I could imagine him as a child shaking with fear if not of his father’s physicality and voice then at the uncertainty of what is to come out of the man he calls ‘father’.

He clearly forgives his father throughout the letter as he mentions countless times that he can try and understand what made him this way. I think the adult Kafka understands what the young Kafka could never and this is paradox looms in the reader’s mind. It gives such insight to how we are forever affected by the people who bring us to this earth. If we had experienced such things at the hands of an uncle, aunt, or any distant relative, it is never the same as your own parent.

Kafka has the ability to speak highly of both his parents yet give a raw peak into his difficult childhood experiences all at the same time. While this letter seemingly never made it to his father as his mother kept it away, it’s still interesting to think of how his father would have read through it. Would it have made him contemplate these events? Or would he have brushed it off as unnecessary reflections by a son who feels too much?

This letter will definitely have an everlasting effect on my brain as a mother but also as a daughter. It’s a letter no parent ever wants to receive. And just to see such an iconic and talented man whose name will forever live in the world of literature not able to please the one person he wished to impress – the epitomy of ‘we can’t have it all’.

Favourite quotes:
“In a way, I was safe writing”

“I was convinced I would never even get through the first year at school, but I succeeded, I was even awarded a prize; but I would certainly never pass the grammar-school entrance exam, yet again I succeeded; but then I would certainly fail my year at school, but no, I did not fail, in fact I kept on succeeding. But this did not give me confidence, on the contrary, I became convinced – and your disapproving face was formal proof of this – that the more I succeeded, the worse my eventual downfall would be.”

“Not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can only treat a child in the way you yourself are constituted.”

“It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”

“We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment, believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect.”

The end.