One learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.
franz Kafkaquotes
1883 - 1924
The novels and short stories of German-Jewish lawyer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), continue to awaken literary debate, and provoke new and living interpretations for each generation who reads them. Kafka’s fame arose after his death, and his writing greatly influenced German literature.
A somewhat tormented soul, who wrestled with depression, social anxiety, suicide and a tyrannical father, was nonetheless, a writer who masterfully suspended the fantastical within reality (The Judgement), and the literal within the metaphor (The Metamorphosis).
His friends found him charming and humorous, and he had neat, boyish good looks. Nonetheless, his battle with tuberculosis, and a deep fear that people found him repulsive infected his romantic relationships, and contributed to a certain self-loathing.
His literature brings us commentary on divine grace and authentic living, man’s struggle to find security (In the Penal Colony, Amerika), overcoming isolation (The Castle) and finding one’s purpose (Description of a Struggle, The Great Wall of China).
And though his parents never did understand his need to record his “dreamlike inner state,” the rest of the world can appreciate how his works transcend meaning and interpretation, always letting the reader go further into the mind, the heart, the estrangement of the modern man.
Only here is suffering really suffering. Not in the way that those who suffer here are to be ennobled in some other world for their suffering, but that what passes for suffering in this world is, in another world, without any change and merely without its contrariety, bliss.
When I say something, this thing immediately and definitively loses its importance. When I write it down, it also loses it, but sometimes gains another importance.
importance / say / write
Everything bad and weak in me held me back.
Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.
Hold fast! Then you too will see the unchangeable dark distance, out of which nothing can come except one day the chariot; it rolls up, gets bigger and bigger, fills the whole world at the moment it reaches you – and you sink into it like a child sinking into the upholstery of a carriage that drives through the storm and night.
But when at long last he had got his head out over the side of the bed, in mid-air, he became afraid of continuing in this manner, for if he were to fall like that it would take a miracle for him not to sustain a head injury. And consciousness was the last thing he wanted to lose at the present time; he would rather stay in bed.
afraid / bed / consciousness / miracle
But then – I was just following him in reverie over mountain and valley – he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, utterly uncomprehending. Who was it? A child? A gymnast? A daredevil? A suicide? A tempter? An annihilator?
The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.
If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.