Franz Kafka
The dearest writer to me.
“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves... A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
- Franz Kafka
From:
The Zürau Aphorisms,
Franz Kafka
1917–1918
("Early on the morning of August 13, 1917, Franz Kafka woke up and found himself spitting blood. It was a haemorrhage, the first sign of what was diagnosed a few weeks later as pulmonary tuberculosis. His employers granted him extended sick-leave, and on September 12 he left Prague for the village of Zürau (now Siřem) in north-western Bohemia. Kafka's aphorisms have generally been neglected by his critics, or, at best, treated as marginal glosses on his fiction.")
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"Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving."
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"There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you."
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"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
the trial...the nature of humans and their tragic fallen state.
this novel is remarkable.
The beauty of the writing makes me wanna stay in this world of his...dreams.
There is a very weird sense of known places and people and feelings, that is ..comforting?
The tone of the book is mesmerizing;
like the dark poetry.
There is satire in fatalistic resignation.
that 'laughter' is strangely comforting.
from The Trial
by
Franz Kafka
(1920)
"One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless."