[Kafka was supposed to send a letter to Carl Bauer and he wrote the draft in his August 21 (1913) diary entry]
You hesitate to answer my request, that's completely understandable, any father would do so in the face of any suitor, it is thus by no means the reason for this letter, at most it increases my hope for calm evaluation of this letter. But I'm writing this letter out of fear that your hesitation or your consideration has more general grounds rather than resulting from that single passage of my first letter that by itself would make it necessary and that could have betrayed me. This is the passage that deals with the intolerability of my job.
You will perhaps pass over this word, but you shouldn't, rather you should ask quite precisely about it, then I would have to answer you precisely and briefly as follows. My job is intolerable to me because it is at odds with my only desire and my only calling that is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job can never seize me, but it can certainly shatter me completely. I'm not far from that. Nervous states of the worst sort dominate me without cease and this year of worries and torments about my and your daughter's future has fully proven my lack of resistance. You might ask why I don't give up this job and—I have no wealth—try to support myself by literary work. To this I can give only the pitiful answer that I don't have the strength for it and, as far as I have a general view of my situation, will more likely go to ruin in this job, indeed go to ruin quickly.
And now compare me with your daughter, this healthy, merry, natural strong girl. As often as I repeated it to her in about 500 letters and as often as she reassured me with a "no" that was, to be sure, not convincingly supported—it nonetheless remains true, she will surely be unhappy with me, as far as I can foresee. Not only due to my external circumstances but even far more due to my true nature I am a withdrawn, taciturn unsociable dissatisfied person, but without being able to call this a misfortune for me, for it is only the reflection of my goal. Conclusions can at least be drawn from my way of life at home. Well I live in my family, among the best and most loving people, stranger than a stranger. With my mother in recent years I haven't spoken an average of twenty words a day, with my father hardly ever exchanged more than words of greeting. With my married sisters and my brothers-in-law I don't speak at all, though I'm not angry with them. The reason for it is simply that I don't have even the slightest thing to speak with them about. Everything that isn't literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or hinders me, even if only supposedly. Therefore I lack any propensity for family life except that of the observer at best. I have no sense of kinship, in visitors I positively see malice directed against me.
A marriage couldn't change me, just as my job can't change me.