I am at the Saigon post office, and the large room is bustling like the inside of my head with darting thoughts as I touch pen to paper. Around me are men and women, tourists mostly, with mime-like stances engaged in various stages of thought. The pen is the finest accessory in one’s hands. I wonder how long it has been since they last held one or used it to write to someone. Whom are they writing to? And as I struggle to constrict my thoughts into the square of the postcard, I glance at the powder pink book peeking from under the postcard, the one I picked up two hours ago from the Hanoi Bookstore. It feels serendipitous that I chose to buy Kafka’s recently published letters to Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist and writer. These letters date from 1920 to 1922 and coincidently begin with one written in April.

So, on an extremely muggy April morning a hundred years later, I settle on the stairs of the post office in a strange country and open a few letters that were never meant for my eyes. “The rain which has been going on for two days and one night has just now stopped,” Kafka writes in one missive, his words imbued with a sense of cathartic release. “Of course probably only temporarily, but nonetheless an event worth celebrating, which I am doing by writing to you,” he begins.

Fifteen letters and a handful of twists and turns later when I get up to leave, I watch a guy endlessly fidget with his pen. His eyes dart all over the room and I feel this urge to help. Maybe tell him to begin with the weather, even Kafka did that. If he wanted a more passionate prompt, I could offer him these lines from the book, “I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.” Or this line burning with passion, if he wanted words to describe the loss of words. “I can’t think of anything to write about, I’m just walking around here between the lines, under the light of your eyes, in the breadth of your mouth as in a beautiful happy day, which remains beautiful and happy, even when the head is sick and tired.”

Sparing a thought for the profound intimacy inherent in the act of letter writing seems like an apt way to remember Kafka on his 100th death anniversary. While his enigmatic genius is best celebrated for his haunting narratives that delve into the labyrinthine depths of the human psyche, he beckons us to reflect upon the creative rewards of letter writing. Amidst the existential angst that permeates his works, lies a lesser-explored facet of his legacy—the art of correspondence.

In the recently published collection of Kafka’s letters to Milena, we glimpse into the inner sanctum of his stories. The letters offer a poignant juxtaposition of Kafka’s inner turmoil and his yearning for connection. Kafka’s fear of marriage led to three broken engagements, of which he writes at length to Milena in whom he found solace beyond romance. For Milena was not just Kafka’s beloved muse and confidante, she was a journalist, translator and political activist, a multifaceted persona who served as a mirror to Kafka’s own complexities.

And as I leaf through the pages, I am struck by the quiet intimacy of the written word. Kafka’s legacy extends far beyond the confines of his published works. Even the most private, obscure or fragmentary of his writings have resonated with audiences across the ages—from his enigmatic diaries to the mystifying aphorisms that littered his notebooks. And yet, it is perhaps in his letters that Kafka’s true genius shines brightest.

For instance, in his exchanges with Felice Bauer, his fiancée at one time, Kafka unveils his innermost self with a raw, visceral intensity. A voice that reverberates far beyond his fiction. “Write to me only once a week,” he implores, “so that your letter arrives on Sunday—for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them.” It is a plea born out of profound vulnerability, a recognition of the overwhelming power that words wield over the heart. “For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”

In a world that increasingly demands our attention in microseconds and character limits, we are robbed of the romance of the slow, deliberate act of penning a letter. It is not just romance; even when Kafka lay on his deathbed, his body ravaged by disease, he sought solace through a poignant letter to his father. He bared his soul of pent-up emotion and unspoken grievances. The written word is a means of catharsis, Kafka teaches us time and again. “In my writing I had, in fact, got some distance away from you by my own efforts, even if it was slightly reminiscent of the worm that, when a foot treads on its tail end, breaks loose with its front part and drags itself aside. To a certain extent I was in safety; there was a chance to breathe freely. The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me ... My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you, yet, although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction determined by me.”

Consider the last time you wrote or even thought with such fervour, solely for one person or to delve into the depths of your own essence—when was it? It seems like an anachronism. And yet, perhaps it is precisely in this anachronism that we f ind the true essence of our humanity; the ability to connect with one another on a level that transcends the limitations of time and space. In Kafka’s letters, I find echoes of my own yearning for connection, and the silly desire to envelop the lived experience of a loved one. When we trade the slow pace of pen on paper for digital haste, what do we lose along with the quiet moments between each word? As I trace the contours of Kafka’s words with the same fingers I employ to write, I think of the transformative power of the written word—to heal, to console and, ultimately, to connect us to something greater than ourselves.