![]() ![]() How do you like my drawing? I was once a great draftsman, you know, but then I started to take academic drawing lessons with a bad woman painter and ruined my talent. What’s more, this surprising turn to drawing provides Kafka with an occasion to reflect on his earlier drawings, something that he does more explicitly here than anywhere else in his work: This solution to his dilemma indicates a surprising priority of drawing over writing in the attempt to communicate an image-a dream image. This is arm in arm: But this is how we walked. Kafka writes that they “were closer to each other than one is when walking arm in arm” as they strolled along Prague’s Old Town Square, but then he comes up against the limits of description to capture this imagined scene: “Oh God, how difficult it is to describe on paper the invention I had made for walking not arm in arm, not attracting attention, and yet very close to you.” Just a few lines later, he has another go at it: “How on earth can I describe how we walked in my dream?” Then he finds a way: “But wait, I’ll draw it. ![]() In a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, on February 11–12, 1913, Kafka describes a dream that was prompted by Felice’s recollection of their first meeting in Prague in August 1912. ![]()
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