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Writing letters,” Franz Kafka once complained (in a letter) to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and the object of his tortured love, “is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.” In a letter, a version of yourself has to be pinned to the paper, made into something that can fit inside an envelope. Because of the inevitable delays of the mail, the self that finally reaches its recipient will bear only a spectral relation to the self that you have meanwhile become. And when their letter arrives, in response to yours, the lags compound. Ghosts commingle in the mail, and all the while actual correspondents remain painfully out of touch.
For Kafka, this doomed the project of immediacy—“How did people ever get the idea they could communicate by letter!”—but for Rilke and Kappus it was an essential feature of letter writing’s occult technology. “So much has to happen,” Rilke warned Kappus, in his second letter, “has to go right, a whole constellation of circumstances has to be in place, for anyone to actually advise, much less help, another person.” They were in many ways out of synch, misaligned. But, precisely because their letters produced so many ghostly selves, they made it possible for Rilke and Kappus to meet in a higher realm. The constellations we see in the night sky have, after all, been formed by light sent from vastly distant points in space and time.
