Monthly Archives: February 2011

How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

— Kafka, quoted here

To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.

— Kafka, Diaries

The decisively characteristic thing about this world is its transience. In this sense centuries have no advantage over the present moment. Thus the continuity of transience cannot give any consolation; the fact that new life blossoms among the ruins proves not so much the tenacity of life as that of death. If I wish to fight against this world, I must fight against its decisively characteristic element, that is, against its transience. Can I do that in this life, and, what is more, really and not only by means of hope and faith?

And so you want to fight against the world and, what is more, with weapons that are more real than hope and faith. There probably are such weapons, but they can be recognized and used only by those who have certain definite qualifications; I want to see first whether you have these qualifications.

Look into it. But if I have not got them, perhaps I can get them.

Certainly, but that is a matter in which I could not help you.

And so you can only help me if I already have the qualifications.

Yes. To put it more precisely, I cannot help you at all, for if you had these qualifications, you would have everything.

– Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (tr. Kaiser and Wilkins)

I should welcome eternity, and when I do find it I am sad. I should feel myself perfect by virtue of eternity – and feel myself depressed?

You say: I should – feel. In saying this do you express a commandment that is within yourself?

That is what I mean.

Now, it is impossible that only a commandment is implanted in you, in such a way that you only hear that commandment and that nothing more happens. Is it a continual or only an occasional commandment?

As to that, I cannot be sure. I believe, however, it is a continual commandment, but that I hear it only occasionally.

From what do you draw that conclusion?

From the fact that I hear it, as it were, even when I do not hear it, in such a way that, although it is not audible itself, it muffles or embitters the voice bidding me do the other thing: that is to say, the voice that makes me ill at ease with eternity.

And do you hear the other voice in a similar way when the commandment of eternity is speaking?

Yes, then too, indeed sometimes I believe I hear nothing but the other voice and everything else seems to be only a dream and it is as though I were just letting the dream go on talking at random.

Why do you compare the inner commandment to a dream? Does it seem senseless as a dream, incoherent, inevitable, unique, making you happy or frightening you equally without cause, not wholly communicable, but demanding to be communicated?

All that – senseless; for only if I do not obey it can I maintain myself here; incoherent, for I don’t know whose command it is and what he is aiming at; inevitable, for it finds me unprepared, descending upon me as surprisingly as dreams descend upon the sleeper, who, after all, since he lay down to sleep, must have been prepared for dreams. It is unique, or at least seems to be so, for I cannot obey it, it does not mingle with reality, and so it keeps its immaculate uniqueness; it makes me happy or frightens me, both without cause, though admittedly it does the first much more rarely than the second; it is not communicable, because it is not intelligible, and for the same reason it demands to be communicated.

— Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (tr. Kaiser and Wilkins)