My greatest fear is that my mind will become languid all these nerves that buzz and fill will someday become a vegetable
somnolent times will set upon me a spell from which I cannot recover lazily and languorously I shall dwell an intellect without vigour
too much comfort too much praise too much ease shall push me off the cliff of complacency and I shall fall without cognizance a mental suicide, awareness in deep freeze
a hardened blank consciousness that needs to be broken through excavated from a grave of self-righteousness pushed beyond self-set limits melted until the core is seen
I need to feel the pain and hurt cry briny tears and experience grief need to feel unsure undecided obscure myself in anxiety make sure the inner ocean stays unfrozen
From a letter by Franz Kafka to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904 (translated by Richard and Clara Winston): '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, as you write? 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.'