X
Franz Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms differ from most of his other writings in several ways. Two important deviations from Kafka’s normal practice found in these aphorisms are that: 1) the aphorisms deal directly with matters of the spirit; and 2) while Kafka normally wrote in notebooks, in great run-on bursts of prose, the aphorisms were discovered to have been neatly inscribed, one to a page, on separate, loose sheets of paper, and consecutively numbered.
This morning I encountered the aphorism numbered 106. It is more wordy than most of the others. Also, unlike the majority of the others, it is divided into two sections.
In contemplating the meaning of aphorism number 106, I have found it instructive to go back and to consider the first section in light of the second, reversing their order. The second section is:
Can you know anything that is not deception? Once deception was destroyed, you wouldn’t be able to look, at the risk of turning into a pillar of salt.
Tough stuff. So, keeping that under your tongue, consider the longer first section:
Humility gives everyone, even the lonely and the desperate, his strongest tie to his fellow men. Immediately and spontaneously, too, albeit only if the humility is complete and lasting. It does so because it is the language of prayer and is both worship and tie. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer; the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; out of prayer is drawn the strength with which to strive.
_______________________________________
Can you know anything that is not deception? Once deception was destroyed, you wouldn’t be able to look, at the risk of turning into a pillar of salt.
Well, can you, huh?
No, I didn’t think so. Neither you, nor I.
X
Showing posts with label Franz Kafka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franz Kafka. Show all posts
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Reflections: On Humility and Bathroom Etiquette
X
The following two excerpts seem to be complementary:
1. Description of the work-life of a men’s room attendant, from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace:
The trick of his demeanor is to appear only provisionally there, to exist all and only if needed. Aid without intrusion. Service without servant. No man wants to know another man can smell him. Millionaires who do not tip. Natty men who splatter the bowls and tip a nickel. Heirs who steal towels. Tycoons who pick their noses with their thumb. Philanthropists who throw cigar butts on the floor. Self-made men who spit in the sink. Wildly rich men who do not flush and without a thought leave it to someone else to flush because this is literally what they are used to – the old saw Would you do this at home.
2. A briefer, but more universal, description of the proper attitude towards man's lot in life, from The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, No. 52:
In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.
In other words, in this life, a little humility is called for.
X
The following two excerpts seem to be complementary:
1. Description of the work-life of a men’s room attendant, from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace:
The trick of his demeanor is to appear only provisionally there, to exist all and only if needed. Aid without intrusion. Service without servant. No man wants to know another man can smell him. Millionaires who do not tip. Natty men who splatter the bowls and tip a nickel. Heirs who steal towels. Tycoons who pick their noses with their thumb. Philanthropists who throw cigar butts on the floor. Self-made men who spit in the sink. Wildly rich men who do not flush and without a thought leave it to someone else to flush because this is literally what they are used to – the old saw Would you do this at home.
2. A briefer, but more universal, description of the proper attitude towards man's lot in life, from The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, No. 52:
In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.
In other words, in this life, a little humility is called for.
X
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Readings: On Cosmic Distance
X
Having previously conjoined the names of Franz Kafka and Simone Weil here, I was struck—when reading the essay on Kafka in the Joyce Carol Oates book, New Heaven, New Earth—by the similarity of the following passage excerpted from Kafka’s "A Message from the Emperor," to the passage below it, from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace.
First, Kafka:
The emperor…has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun…The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng… But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. …how vainly does he wear out his strength… Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Now, Weil:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
…the sense of distance; the sense of cosmic loneliness; the sense, nonetheless, of the urgency of the journey that each passage evokes…
X
Having previously conjoined the names of Franz Kafka and Simone Weil here, I was struck—when reading the essay on Kafka in the Joyce Carol Oates book, New Heaven, New Earth—by the similarity of the following passage excerpted from Kafka’s "A Message from the Emperor," to the passage below it, from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace.
First, Kafka:
The emperor…has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun…The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng… But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. …how vainly does he wear out his strength… Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Now, Weil:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
…the sense of distance; the sense of cosmic loneliness; the sense, nonetheless, of the urgency of the journey that each passage evokes…
X
Friday, July 3, 2009
Quote du Jour: A Shadow World?
X
This is worth thinking about:
The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.
~ Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms, No. 96; tr. Michael Hofmann
X
This is worth thinking about:
The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.
~ Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms, No. 96; tr. Michael Hofmann
X
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Reflections: Dopplegänging It
Have you ever found yourself understanding—understanding with real breadth and depth—another person concerning whom that understanding reveals the source of one’s personal existential trials in a clear light? For me, there have been at least two such persons: Simone Weil and Franz Kafka.
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
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.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
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.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
X
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Readings: Needles from the Haystack
Following are some brief excerpts which, to me, resonate truth. The quotes are taken from books I read over the winter of 2006-2007, during a period when I was chiefly engaged in the reading of The Notebooks of Simone Weil, The Book of Acts, and the Epistles of St. Paul:
“My generation wanted to shed unnecessary guilt, irrational respect, emotional dependence; but the process has become altogether too much like sterilization. It may be a remedy for one problem, but it has created another. We are saved from breeding relationships we cannot feed; but we are also prevented from breeding those we need.”
--John Fowles, Daniel Martin
“One of the monsters in my father’s seventeenth-century theological bestiary was quietism; it always sounded attractive to me when he denounced it…the notion that both virtue and vice were the enemies of grace.”
--John Fowles, Daniel Martin
--Allen Ginsberg, in the poem “Kaddish”; the concept: “sanity, a trick of agreement.”
“The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.
--Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
“The will of heaven cannot be conceived as though it were the will of earth. Heaven has very different views; what seems to us important is to it insignificant, and vice versa. What we avoid may, in its eyes, be useful, necessary; what we regard as central is to it peripheral; and what we fail altogether to discern is viewed by it, as the focal point of human life.”
--Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer
“My generation wanted to shed unnecessary guilt, irrational respect, emotional dependence; but the process has become altogether too much like sterilization. It may be a remedy for one problem, but it has created another. We are saved from breeding relationships we cannot feed; but we are also prevented from breeding those we need.”
--John Fowles, Daniel Martin
“One of the monsters in my father’s seventeenth-century theological bestiary was quietism; it always sounded attractive to me when he denounced it…the notion that both virtue and vice were the enemies of grace.”
--John Fowles, Daniel Martin
--Allen Ginsberg, in the poem “Kaddish”; the concept: “sanity, a trick of agreement.”
“The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.
--Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
“The will of heaven cannot be conceived as though it were the will of earth. Heaven has very different views; what seems to us important is to it insignificant, and vice versa. What we avoid may, in its eyes, be useful, necessary; what we regard as central is to it peripheral; and what we fail altogether to discern is viewed by it, as the focal point of human life.”
--Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
