July 31, 2013 Williams Lake, Canada
Czech writer Franz Kafka stayed at his sister's place in rural Zurau in 1917-18. He had tuberculosis, which would kill him in 1924. While at Zurau, Kafka wrote thoughts on more than 100 pieces of paper, each 14.5 x 11.5 centimetres. Kafka's friend Max Brod disobeyed Kafka's wish to destroy his writings after his death, instead publishing much of them, including, in 1953, these thoughts.
Decades later, Roberto Calasso found the pieces of paper in Oxford's New Bodleian Library. Translator Geoffrey Brock and poet Michael Hofmann translated from the original German. Calasso published them in 2006, in the order in which Kafka wrote them, unlike the order that Brod used. What Brod called Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way Calasso called The Zurau Aphorisms.
I write because the aphorisms reminded me of much I have seen elsewhere. I lack Kafka's scholarly and literary talent and output, but I offer my thoughts to show how stimulating Kafka remains. Perhaps his words remind you of other things: literature becomes classic by pleasing and teaching different people and eras. Tell me what the aphorisms below stir in you.
Here follow various of Kafka's aphorisms and my responses. Please respond and criticize.
16. " A cage went in search of a bird."
This is the only one I knew before I read the book.
22. "You are the exercise, the task. No student far and wide."
I recall Marshall McLuhan's idea that the medium is the messsage, his pompous plagiarism of an idea of fellow Canadian Harold Innes.
24. "Grasp the good fortune that the ground on which you stand cannot be any bigger than the two feet planted on it."
Editor Calasso writes that Kafka was reading Soren Kierkegaard at this time of his life. My paltry reading of Kierkegaard arises as I read this proto-existentialist insight.
34. "His exhaustion is that of the gladiator after the combat; his labor was the whitewashing of a corner of the wall in his office."
This reminds me of the saying, "Mighty labor bringeth forth a mouse" and my 1986 Edmonton job experience. I worked for a consulting company that wrote grant applications for wage subsidies for businesses, who then gave the company a percentage of the awarded grant. Businesses thought we were hardworking geniuses, but I knew that we merely knew what to write, and to whom. Two of us recent business school graduates worked for this company, owned by one man, who also employed a receptionist. One day, I told the other grad, who had played junior hockey against Chris Chelios in Saskatchewan but that's another story; one day, I told Doug, "Doug," I said, "Those business guys think we're taming lions, but really we're chasing mice." Kafka didn't like mice in his rural bedroom, but he watched them in the Zurau fields. Calasso wrote this in an afterword essay. Unlike the aphorism man, Doug and I weren't exhausted, so perhaps this Kafka aphorism reminded me of something dissimilar, not similar to Kafka's meaning.
50. "A man cannot live without a steady faith in something indestructible within him, though both the faith and the indestructible thing may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the forms of this concealment is the belief in a personal god."
This paradoxical pronouncement hints at a cynical view of religion and contempt for the idea of a personal god, contempt that Albert Einstein shared. Kafka here opposes my view that religion weakens more than it strengthens., that religion is unnecessary at best, harmful at worst. I'm happy to live a mortal life, a brief consciousness of existence before I disappear back into the void.. According to Calasso, Kafka rarely wrote of religion elsewhere, but he wrote plenty in this book.
54. "The world is only ever a constructed world; what we call the sensual world is Evil in the constructed world, and what we call Evil is only a fleeting necessity in our eternal development."
"With a very strong light, one can make the world disappear. Before weak eyes it will become solid; before still weaker eyes, it will acquire fists; and to eyes yet weaker, it will be embarrassed and punch the face of anyone who dares to look at it."
The first part of this two-part passage reminds me of the debate between Plato, who said that reason compels us to do good, and Aristotle, who said that reason gives us the choice to do good or not. I read this so long ago that I might misrepresent both philosophers. Evil as developmental necessity is an idea older than Dante, as old as the Garden of Eden, of which Kafka also writes in this book.
The second passage reminds me of 1700s Irish philosopher Berkeley's notion that, examined closely enough, reality is illusory. Again, I might misrepresent Berkeley; I'm a long time out of academia, and I read Berkeley on my own, not under a professor's tutelage.
56. "There are questions we could never get past, were it not that we are freed of them by nature."
This reminds me of contemporary English zoologist Richard Dawkins' idea that we evolved at the mid-scale, and that we are therefore less able to comprehend the large scale, such as cosmic distance or the small scale, such as the microscopic.
58. "The way to tell fewest lies is to tell fewest lies, not to give oneself the fewest opportunities of telling lies."
As well as contradict the Catholic dictim about avoiding what leads to sin, this recalls English poet John Milton's idea that the mind itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell; that is, evil can pass through the mind and not corrupt it.
60. "Whoever renounces the world must love humanity, because he is also renouncing their world. Accordingly, he will begin to have a true sense of human nature, which is incapable of anything but being loved, assuming, that is, that one is on the same footing as it."
This reminds me of Kant's categorical imperative, to act in such a way that it can be a universal rule, to wish for all what one wishes for oneself. Kant has long been a socialistic brake on my aspirations for wealth and fame, aspirations now closer to expirations. Still, I like this aphorism's anti-materialism view that people are naturally good and lovable.
64/65. "The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not."
Feel the wind, the sun, the rain. Hear children's voices and laughter and tales. See a deer beside the road, as I do at least once a week here in rural Canada. Sing a song, your eyes twinkling. Hug someone who needs it. Find your needed hug. Read a great poem. Grasp these and you grasp paradise, I thought as I read this, with or without Plato's and Carlyle's argumentative help. "Heaven is right here and now, not beyond the stars" came to mind from a 1976 song I learned young:
http://www.shariulrich.com/DSC10.php?offset=0&entry_id=2
http://www.canadianbands.com/Hometown%20Band.html
Good old Shari Ulrich and the Hometown Band, West Coast music. If I live in Lotusland am I a lotus eater? "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels," am I Saint Paul? I digress too far from Kafka, a good Jewish boy whose bible was complete without St. Paul's help.
Bear, and I see the odd bear hereabouts; bear another brief digression to The Louvre, where my time was oh so brief. My younger sister not only brought me, ever grateful, to France and the Louvre in 2011. She, who can read Kafka in the original German, also mailed me this Kafka book, which arrived today, with a Louvre postcard. As I read the book, I noted on the postcard the aphorisms I'd comment on here. Alas, by aphorism 64/65, the card was full of my notes, huddled around my sister's words. I therefore continued my notes on the free newspaper, worth that much, that also came my way today.
Get a glass of schnapps and we'll resume, with a long entry, not to be confused with the long entries, wink wink nudge nudge, retold in Molly Bloom monologue in James Joyce's Ulysses, written during Kafka's era and finally re-read by me this summer, after my original, youthful, naive, 1981 reading of it.
66. "He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it. At the same time he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven because he is also attached to a similar heavenly chain. If he wants to go to earth, the heavenly manacles will throttle him, if he wants to go to heaven, the earthly manacles will. But for all that, all possibilities are open to him, as he is well aware, yes, he even refuses to believe the whole thing is predicated on a mistake going back to the time of his first enchantment."
Goethe's Faust, a tale I know better as Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Bound, Don Quixote's tilting at windmills in that best novel of the millenium, I heard, all these come to mind as I realize that many people seek the edge, the limit. Still, heaven remains our habitation too: secure, peaceful; but still we're chained from the time of first enchantment. Eden? Milton's Paradise Lost starts with disobedience, the devil its most alluring character. Did the devil cast off his chain, to be freer, but never to know peace or security again?
72. "The same person has perceptions that, for all their differences, have the same object, which leads one to infer that there are different subjects contained within one and the same person."
Ulysses has a chapter in the form of questions and answers about the main character, Leopold Bloom, and his youthful, one-day sidekick Stephen Dedalus. One of the chapter's themes is differing perceptions, between the two and within each character. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I last read when I first read it, in 1981, Stephen replies to someone who says he saw him last week, "That was another me." You cannot put your foot in the same river twice, because it has flowed between the two times of contact, the Ancient Greek Heraclitus wrote. We're the river, not the stepper. Further, we're diverse at the same time. It's nice to read that someone else thinks that "I" is "We." Or are the subjects within us, an inversion of The Matrix? To the idea that all can be an illusion and that our senses therefore lie to us, 1700s English writer Samuel Johnson said that when he kicked a stone his foot hurt. I could be mistaken about this aphorism. Your thoughts?
74. "If what was supposed to be destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it can't have been decisive; however, if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief."
I wrote that this reminded me of 64/65 but now I can't remember why. Older and tired more than sadder and wiser, I think I'll resume later. I hope I remember what I meant to say about the many other aphorisms I noted, given that I can read my notes.
August 1, 2013 Williams Lake, Canada
Perhaps it's the absolutism of 64/65 and 74 that made me equate them. Perhaps it's the mention of us, in Paradise now in 64/65, but not in it, or in a false belief, in 74. What do you think?
76. "The feeling: 'I'm not dropping anchor here,' and straightaway the feeling of the sustaining sea-swell around one."
The English poet John Keats wrote of "negative capability" as being at peace despite chaos and indecision.
81. "No one can crave what truly harms him. If in the case of some individuals things have that appearance, and perhaps they always do, the explanation is that someone within the person is demanding something useful to himself but very damaging to a second person, who has been brought along partly to give his opinion on the matter. If the man had taken the part of the second person from the outset, and not just when the time came to make a decision, then the first person would have been suppressed, and with it the craving."
My note equated this with 54, but my 54 note of the Plato-Aristotle debate over whether we naturally or consciously choose good seems little relevant to 54, but more relevant to 81. This aphorism seems closer to 58, choosing not to lie rather than avoiding situations that tempt one to lie. I'm surprised to find the deliberative Kafka write of cravings, and of their rejection, a moralistic theme.
82. "Why do we harp on about Original Sin? It wasn't on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but because of the Tree of Life, lest we eat of its fruit."
My note mentions 54 and 81, because 54 says that experience, even of evil, develops us, and because 81 judges the virtue of different experiences. Perhaps gaining knowledge is wrong because it begins by disobeying God. D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow venerates learning by doing more than it judges the virtue of what one does.
83. "We are sinful, not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The condition in which we find ourselves is sinful, guilt or no guilt."
Knowledge doomed us, but life redeems us. Had we eaten of Life before we ate of Knowledge, would we have stayed in Paradise? Or does eating Life end in death? What was our state before we had life? Were we in that Greek/Jewish "Hall of Souls," which gives a soul to each newborn, "trailing clouds of glory," in William Wordsworth's words?
84. "We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our designation has been changed; we are not told whether this has happened to Paradise as well."
I like this one a lot: even Paradise changes, and is perhaps destructible, as 74 posits. In 64/65 Paradise seems unchanging. William Godwin's 1790s anarchist book Enquiry Concerning Political Understanding argued that anarchism will improve the human condition, after an initial dip into danger and disorder due to past conditioning toward hierarchy and away from freedom. Godwin's anarchist revolution won't end, but rather continue to elevate us. We were created for a Paradise of our own making?
86. "Ever since Original Sin, we are basically all alike in our ability to know Good and Evil; even so, this is where we seek a particular advantage. Actually, it's only after knowledge that the real differences begin. The appearance to the contrary is provoked in the following way: No one can be satisfied with understanding alone but must make an effort to act in accordance with it. He lacks the strength to do so; therefore he must destroy himself, even at the risk of not receiving the necessary strength; it is simply that he has no option other than to undertake this final effort. (This is the meaning of the penalty of death for eating of the Tree of Knowledge; it may also be the original meaning of natural death.) The effort is daunting; one would rather reverse the original knowledge of Good and Evil; (the term 'Original Sin' refers to this fear) but what was done cannot be undone, only muddied. To this end motivations appear. The entire world is full of them, yes the whole visible world may be nothing more than a motivation of a man wanting to rest for a moment. An attempt to forget the fact of knowledge, to make of the knowledge an end in itself."
Kafka wrote this on a 14.5 x 11.5 cm piece of paper! Others say less with more words. I note knowledge as an end in itself, whereas Thomas Aquinas would call knowledge a means to God. Knowledge and God seem less compatible to Kafka, but the man at rest, avoiding action, which destroys him, seems to long for the time before the Fall, before knowledge.
93. "No psychology ever again!"
Short, pointed, unlike long 86, this makes me think of the material universe as all there is. Kafka saw an impenetrable black box long before psychologist B.F. Skinner coined the phrase.
94. "Two tasks of the beginning of life: to keep reducing your circle, and to keep making sure you're not hiding somewhere outside it."
My older sister once told me that we make mental boxes, live in them, and then bemoan that life. Kafka's containers shrink, and we disobey by hiding outside of them. Happier inside or out?
97. "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."
In mortal life, we see "as through a glass darkly," not clearly, as we'll see in the afterlife, Saint Paul wrote. Christ answered a question about who in Heaven would be the husband of a woman married more than once on Earth by saying that such situations aren't contradictory in Heaven. Earthly suffering doesn't change but doesn't hurt in Heaven, a cosmically different frame of reference.
98. "The conception of the infinite plenitude and expanse of the universe is the result of taking to an extreme a combination of strenuous creativity and free contemplation."
The English physicist Arthur Eddington wrote that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. Aphorisms 97 and 98 connect.
104. "Man has free will, and of three sorts:
First he was free when he wanted this life; now admittedly he cannot take back his decision, because he is no longer the one who wanted it then, he must do his own will then by living.
Second he is free inasmuch as he can choose the pace and the course of his life.
Third he is free in that as the person he will one day be, he has the will to go through life under any condition and so come to himself, on some path of his own choosing, albeit sufficiently labyrinthine that it leaves no little spot of life untouched.
This is the triple nature of free will, but being simultaneous, it is also single, and is in fact so utterly single that it has no room for a will at all, whether free or unfree."
In a University of Ottawa lecture hall in 1988, I was in a crowd to whom the late Canadian author Robertson Davies said that we have no free will, so determined by circumstances are our lives. Kafka's collapsed categories deny free will, but singly they uphold it. The first notes that the act of choosing will limit future choices, the third notes the limiting obstacles along any path, and the "inasmuch" in the second implies that choice exists but is limited.
Thus end the aphorisms on which I comment. Editor Robert Calasso's afterword essay, "Veiled Splendor," discusses much, including the mice that rattled Kafka. I trapped many mice while I grew up near Edson: I remember watching one sniff at, then die in the trap. Mice infested my teacherage trailer in Alkali Lake, and my teacherage log house in Kluskus. I trapped mice, didn't fear them. Sometimes I see a mouse gallop across a road, its legs so small that it seems to slide rather than run.
Kafka wrote that a cat could chase away the mice, but that he'd then need to chase away the cat.
Calasso says that Kafka rankled at Brod's description of Kafka as "successful and admirable." Kafka was both, but his irritation came from resistance to conformity, not from false modesty, I think.
Kafka wrote that his literary creations were "unquestionably within" him. Ever feel that yourself?
I do, but usually I rest until the feeling passes, like the resting man in aphorism 86.
Calasso doesn't like Brod's title Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, but both agree "that these slips of paper constitute the only text in which Kafka directly confronts theological themes." Is Kafka a materialist? I doubt it, because Kafka admired Pascal, who was religious.
Canadian poet Earl Birney concludes "The Eskimo Woman" with "Then she had rest." It seems she died, unlike the man in aphorism 86, who merely rested. I'm done. Now you and I have rest. I hope my words neither left you dead, nor left you wanting me dead.
