On July 21, 1913, Franz Kafka took to his diary to list the pros and cons of getting married. He was hopelessly in love with Felice Bauer at the time and suffering the throes of an existential agony over his future. Kafka would eventually pen some 500 love letters to Bauer, extending beyond the five-year period during which the couple were twice engaged, but never married. In his diary he listed seven “arguments” that tugged him one way then the other, the first being his “inability to endure life alone”.
With more self-knowledge than was perhaps evident in his love letters, he confessed: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the
