Prompt 284. Franz Kafka and the Doll - Susan Cain
August Macke, Blond Girl with Doll (1910)
The fact that love sometimes returns in a different form doesn't mean that you won't feel seared and scalded when it goes away, or fails to appear in the first place, that its absence won't rip your life apart.
Franz Kafka was one of the great European novelists of the twentieth century. But there's another story, this one written not by Kafka but about him, by the Spanish writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra. This story is based on the memoirs of a woman named Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin, just before his death.
In this story, Kafka takes a walk in the park, where he meets a tearful little girl who just lost her favorite doll. Hetries and fails to help find the doll, then tells the girl that the doll must have taken a trip, and he, a doll postman, would send word from her. The next day, he brings the girl a letter, which he'd composed the night before. Don't be sad, says the doll in the letter. "I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures." After that, Kafka gives the girl many such letters. The doll is going to school, meeting exciting new people. Her new life prevents her from returning, but she loves the girl, and always will.
At their final meeting, Kafka gives the girl a doll, with an attached letter. He knows that this doll looks different from the lost one, so the letter says: "My travels have changed me."
The girl cherishes the gift for the rest of her life. And many decades later, she finds another letter stuffed into an overlooked cranny in the substitute doll. This one says: "Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form."
This fictional Kafka, in the voice of the doll, was teaching the girl how to draw strength from her own imagination.But he was also showing her how to perceive love in its many forms—including the form that he brought into being—by inventing the role of doll postman.
Maybe this story is apocryphal, maybe it's factual. The record's not quite clear. Either way, it's deeply true. The fact that love sometimes returns in a different form doesn't mean that you won't feel seared and scalded when it goes away, or fails to appear in the first place, that its absence won't rip your life apart. It can also feel impossible to accept that the love you long for will not return in the form you first longed for it. Your parents who divorced when you were seven will not get back together, and even if they did, you're no longer the child you were when they split. If you do return to your birth country, it will be as a stranger, and you may find that the lemon groves whose scent is still so fragrant in your memory have been paved into parking lots. You will never find again the specific places or people or dreams that you've lost.
But you can find something else. You can have momentary glimpses—which may only be glimpses but still they're momentous—of your own perfect and beautiful vision of the perfect and beautiful world.
- Susan Cain
