Rainy Sunday evening links

Given what I've just posted, I am not feeling my (sometimes) usual Sunday evening melancholy, but I did find myself moved by these couple of links.

The first, a letter from Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady. This part kills me:

"I still have love longings and yet have not in my lifetime founded a relationship with anyone which is satisfactory and never will unless I change and grow somehow out of this egoistic grayness and squalor. Drifting like I am or could would leave me with no hope but stolen fruits. I had begun to get hung up on the metaphysical image and the subterranean peyotelites here. Must stop playing with my life in a disappointed grey world. Maybe go back to analysis. I am miserable now—not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me—resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me,—the tenderness I never had. I don’t want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I can’t turn to you for that any more, can’t come to Frisco for you, because how much you love me, it is still something wrong, not complete, not still enough, not—god knows what not—you know how I was before and what I am, my hang-ups. Do you think that is all I shall get ever, so that is why I should come out? Maybe that is not bad idea but I still want to seek more. I suppose maybe I’m looking too hung-up at a simple sociable proposition."

Then there's this piece on recent biographies of Kafka. Andrew Sullivan highlights one of the more poignant anecdotes that stood out to him in Kevin Jackson's piece, involving Kafka, a little girl, and a lost doll. I love this part: "Stories can cure the sadness of small girls. They can also frighten, console, give courage. They can help even a sick and dying writer make some sense of what remains of his short life. Kafka seems often to have thought of writing as a curse or (to borrow a term from the literature of shamanism) a sickness vocation. And yet the thing that makes you ill may also, from time to time, make you powerful."