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1d17b30
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The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide,lost in a forest remote from all human habitation
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kafka
metamorphosis
trial
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Franz Kafka |
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c8a7aff
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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kafka
veganism
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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5cef7f8
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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliche (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliche upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.
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irony
history
humour
politics
1968
1970s
1980s
1988
allegiance
arrest
bad-crowds
charter-77
gorbachev
kafka
nelson-mandela
vaclav-havel
zdenek-mlynar
prague
moscow
czechoslovakia
arguments
exile
commitment
bureaucracy
boredom
clichés
generosity
dissent
totalitarianism
detention
mediocrity
charm
russia
communism
loyalty
police
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Christopher Hitchens |
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c527101
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My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.
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writing
kafka
novel
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c15d5ab
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E bom quando nossa consciencia sofre grandes ferimentos, pois isso a torna mais sensivel a cada estimulo. Penso que devemos ler apenas livros que nos ferem, que nos afligem. Se o livro que estamos lendo nao nos desperta como um soco no cranio, por que perder tempo lendo-o? Para que ele nos torne felizes, como voce diz? Oh Deus, nos seriamos felizes do mesmo modo se esses livros nao existissem. Livros que nos fazem felizes poderiamos escrever nos mesmos num piscar de olhos. Precisamos de livros que nos atinjam como a mais dolorosa desventura, que nos assolem profundamente - como a morte de alguem que amavamos mais do que a nos mesmos -, que nos facam sentir que fomos banidos para o ermo, para longe de qualquer presenca humana - como um suicidio. Um livro deve ser um machado para o mar congelado que ha dentro de nos
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metamorforphosis
kafka
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Franz Kafka |
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e6c63f9
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If anything in theology can be called Jewish, it is his virtual lack of any concept of 'Nature'. There is in a sense no 'Nature' in Genesis either, since the world is created man. There may, however, be more modern reasons for the absence of this concept in Kafka's case. His position here resembles that of , whose Existential philosophy represents an attack on Naturalism (while adopting its atheistic presuppositions) and therefore finds no place for nature as such, but only for the world in so far as the world exists 'for human existence', i.e., as 'material'. Heidegger and Kafka are radically original in that aspect of their thought which does away with the natural and the supernatural at the same time. In Kafka the absence of Nature is due to the fact that for him what might be termed the 'institutionalization' of the world is total, indeed totalitarian. There is no room in it for that unoccupied and unused space beyond the sphere of human needs which we are in the habit of revering or enjoying as 'Nature'. Yet there is truth in Kafka's omission of Nature from his world, to the extent that the mechanized civilization of to-day may be described as appropriating and exploiting everything there is as raw material or fuel, and destroying whatever cannot be exploited--even human beings.
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nature
kafka
judaism
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Günther Anders |
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0106a75
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When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.
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kafka
mice
mouse
dying
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Franz Kafka |
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4c2c5b5
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Leo en Dostoievski el pasaje que tanto se asemeja a ser desdichado
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kafka
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Franz Kafka |
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2f057d7
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In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world. (Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt)
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struggle
world
franz
franz-kafka
max-brody
unpublished
zurau
bet
kafka
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Franz Kafka |
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2152a0a
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...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.
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woolf
kafka
thomas-mann
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Peter Watson |
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2056cbc
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Milena lutfen bana yardim edin! Soyleyebildiklerimden daha da fazlasini anlamaya calisin.
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love
milena
kafka
letter
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Franz Kafka |
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28c76d4
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"Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life." --
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writing
life
kafka
writers
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Ernst Pawel |
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e693ab1
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Iki saatlik yasam iki sayfalik bir yazidan daha iyidir diye emin olmayin. Yazi yoksuldur ama daha temizdir.
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love
mektup
yazı
milena
okumak
kafka
hayat
letter
kitap
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Franz Kafka |
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939900f
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No one ever inhabited the threshold more thoroughly than Kafka. On the threshold of happiness; of the beyond; of Canaan; of the door only open for us. On the threshold of escape, of transformation. Of an enormous and final understanding. No one made so much art of it. And yet if Kafka is never sinister or nihilistic, it's because to even reach the threshold requires a susceptibility to hope and vivid yearning. There is a door. There's a way up or over. It's just that one almost certainly won't manage to reach it, or recognize it, or pass through it in this life.
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kafka
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Nicole Krauss |
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af127f7
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"I have never identified with the "K" in Kafka's works, by the way. Having grown up in a democracy, I have dared to imagine that I know at all times who is really in charge, what is really going on. This could be a mistake."
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leadership
kafka
knowledge
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. |
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3b5bed5
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"As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod: "Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian."
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kafka
veganism
vegetarianism
vegan
vegetarian
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Jonathan Safran Foer |