Kafka

I've never read him, but Ponti Mython mentioned him here the other day so I went and took a real look at some of the things Kafka has uttered.

Smart.
And he's clearly a Gemini.

I would have happily forced him to sit with me for 12 hours, drinking coffee and delving into his way of thinking - and then I'd light some candles on the desk and hand him pen and paper and leave him to be so he could write with the knowledge that he was safe and secure and no one would bother him until he was ready to be done.

"Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night."
I understand that perfectly.

"I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp.... And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure... would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness."
For extreme concentration knows no effort...
That could not be more accurate.
At least for people prone to that.
I love that...

"..the books we need are the kind that act upon
us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the
death of someone we love more than ourselves,
that make us feel as though we were on the verge
of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all
human habitation — a book should serve as
the axe for the frozen sea within us"
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us...

I bet a lot of people look at poetry that way; of which I am woefully lacking in comprehension. Give me a book like that though and we're good.

"If I write not what I speak, I speak not what I think, I think not what I ought to
so my writing comes from the deepest darkness."
Someone resurrect him and bring him to me.
I think I love him...

**A letter to his father that I'm going to go back and reread a few times, I'm sure...it's that good...