Horizon

the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished

The national "distraction" this week ought to be seen as a useful conversation, but it feels nothing intelligent or informed can be said about it. How pleasant, instead, to stumble on this brief, mildly interesting review of a biography of Kafka. Alan H. will likely tear it apart, which would provide welcome respite.

Does Gregor Samsa really wake up as a repulsive insect only because he symbolizes isolated genius, as the good-hearted Nabokov read the tale? If we remember the obsessive variations on the motif of the serpent and the apple in Kafka’s private notes, we could instead brood on the possibility that he left the cause of Gregor’s alteration symbolically under our eyes. Gregor dies from an apple, thrown by his father, which sinks “right into his back”, where it then rots. Gregor “felt as if nailed fast and stretched himself out in utter derangement of all his senses”. Subtexts? Who knows? There are hundreds of passages that can be read in this way, or that – either as the cipher of something to be precisely identified, or as the dark flower of a mystery. But as soon as one opens Kafka and falls under the spell of his prose, unequalled in its limpidity and pithiness, another suspicion arises. Perhaps this man was neither enigma nor mystery, but a miracle.