I have brought nothing with me that life requires so far as I know, but only the universal human weakness, in this respect it is gigantic strength, I have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the age in which I live, an age that is of course very close to me, which I have no right ever to fight against, but as it were, a right to represent. The slight amount of the positive and also of the extreme negative, which capsizes into the positive is something in which I have had no hereditary share, I have not been guided into life by the hand of Christianity, admittedly now slack and failing, as Kierkegaard was, and have not caught the hem of the Jewish prayer shawl, now flying away from us as the Zionists have. I am an end or a beginning.
— Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Notes for Nothing 