1918
You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~ Franz Kafka
i return perpetually to this paragraph when i am helpless and frustrated (thankfully rarely) ; it is so luminiscent.
SILAS STRANGE
Do you have a treacherous mind? Is it restless and petulant like the tempestuous sea, whispering to you of your myriad fallings? Does it imagine, unleashing hypothetical fates upon strangers like a malcontent dictator, stories burnished strange and wondrous in the light of your inadequacies; do you wonder, by your lonesome, about the people with things to do and places to go and lovers to hold?
Silas does.
HELLO IT IS GRAMMAR NAZI MOMENT
unless in jest or at knifepoint.
COULD HE BE DREAMING?
The disgraced usurer Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening. (…) He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside. He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise. He watched her chest rise and fall in rapid succession as her fingers made fists and released, and her eyes squinted for no apparent reason. Could she be dreaming? he wondered. And if so, what would a baby dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife. When he pulled her out to feed or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint. TIME OF DYED HANDS IS FINALLY OVER! MOUSE WILL HANG! Or, SOFIOWKA ACCUSED OF RAPE, PLEADS POSSESSED BY PENIS PERSUASION, BECAME “OUT OF HAND.” Or, AVRUM R KILLED IN FLOUR MILL MISHAP, LEAVES BEHIND A LOST SIAMESE CAR OF FORTY-EIGHT YEARS, TAWNY, CHUBBY, BUT NOT FAT, PERSONABLE, MAYBE A LITTLE FAT, ANSWERS TO “METHUSELAH.” OK, FAT AS SHIT. IF FOUND, FREE TO KEEP. Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn’t written on her, it wasn’t important to him. – Jonathan Safran Foer “Everything is Illuminated
i seem to be unable to regard this lonely-old-man-with-singular-preoccupations archetype with the same derisive, anti-sentimentalist glance as i do much many other parts of fiction, having been absolutely weepy for eddie maintanence, silas marner (my cat’s namesake, naturally. what, why’d i have named him after that ridiculously handsome albino from the da vinci code or a cool street brand?), santiago, poor stasi wiesler, the grandfather whose clock stopped, short, never to go again when the old man died (my virgin literary bawl which was done behind a songsheet and really alarmed the nursery teacher) and now yankel d. seriously, how is one to not emphatise with geriatric hermits? answers like generally when one happens to a fully functional young adult don’t apply.
p.s.: JSF wrote this book at 25 – to friends, please forgive any consequent bouts of melancholic existentialia.
p.p.s: photo from HERE.
HELLO WELCOME AGAIN TO FAVOURITE WORD PROPAGANDA
potamophilous = river loving
