David Kanigan
It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun,
but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines
and one can warm oneself a little.
~ Franz Kafka, from Letter to His Father
Notes:
You think you might give me a run for it, but you can’t touch me. You can’t come close, not remotely close to my Superiority. Top 1% of the 1% in…
Mood Swings.
Close your eyes and think bungee jumper, in an infinite loop, who’s boinging up and down in a zone which pulls up short of Bliss and a whisker from Abyss. Not too hot, but hot enough to pinch, and not too cold, but cold enough to feel frost bite, and once in a while tasting Despair, but never lallygagging in Euphoria.
It’s the 5:40 am train. I have the entire seat to myself on Metro North to NYC.
We’re operating on 4.5 hours of sleep, and hauling the wet slushy snow of accumulated sleep deprivation from the prior three days. Eyes heavy. Shoulders heavy. Words from the morning papers slur together. I set down the smartphone.
Tired. Sick and tired of being tired, and bored writing about tired. Tired³. [Read more…]
It had been crossing so long it could not remember.
As it stopped in the middle to look back,
a car sped by, spinning it around.
Disoriented, the chicken realized
it could no longer tell which way it was going.
It stands there still.
— John McNamee, Kafka’s joke book
Source: Photograph: Robin Loznak. Joke: kafkaesque-world
Franz Kafka’s signature in a letter to Milena Jesenská. It reads:
Franz wrong, F wrong, Yours wrong
nothing more, calm, deep forestPrague
July 29, 1920.
In 1919, Milena Jesenská was working as a translator. She discovered a short story (The Stoker) by Prague writer Franz Kafka, and wrote him to ask for permission to translate it from German to Czech. The letter launched an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská and Kafka met twice: they spent four days in Vienna and later a day in Gmünd. Eventually Kafka broke off the relationship, partly because Jesenská was unable to leave her husband, and their almost daily communication ceased abruptly in November 1920. They meant so much to each other, however, that they did exchange a few more letters in 1922 and 1923 (and Kafka turned over to Jesenská his diaries at the end of his life). Kafka is regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life. (Source: Wiki)
Source: Journal of a Nobody
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
– Franz Kafka
Sources:
