The ghostly element

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

A roaring nothing

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

Qualifications

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)

The commandment of eternity

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)

An end or a beginning

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

Another Abraham

But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty youngster that was his child. He is afraid that after starting out as Abraham with his son he would change on his way into Don Quixote… An Abraham who should come unsummoned!

— Kafka

Amateurish

All that he does seems to him, it is true, extraordinarily new, but also, because of the incredible spate of new things, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed scarcely tolerable, incapable of becoming history, breaking short the chain of the generations, cutting off for the first time at its most profound source the music of the world, which before him could at least be divined. Sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself.

— Kafka

He gobbles up the leavings and crumbs that fall from his own table; in this way he is, of course, for a little while more thoroughly sated than all the rest, but he forgets how to eat from the table itself. In this way, however, there cease to be any crumbs and leavings.

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

Kafka quotes 3

‘What is it? What is it?’ I exclaimed, still held down in bed by sleep, and stretched my arms upwards. Then I got up, still far from being conscious of the present, and with the feeling that I must thrust aside various people who were in my way, made the necessary gestures, and so at last reached the open window.

*

We are all fighting a battle. (If, attacked by the ultimate question, I reach out behind me for weapons, I cannot choose which of those weapons I will have, and even if I could choose, I should be bound to choose some that don’t belong to me, for we all have only one store of weapons.) I cannot fight a battle all of my own; if for once I believe I am independent, if for once I see nobody around me, it soon turns out that as a consequence of the general constellation, which is not immediately or even not at all intelligible to me, I have had to take this post over. This, of course, does not exclude the fact that there is a cavalry spearhead, stragglers, snipers, and all the usual and abnormal items of warfare, but there is no one who fights an independent battle. [Humiliation] of vanity? Yes, but also a necessary encouragement, and one in accordance with the truth.

*

A sunray of bliss.

*

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

*

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.

*

Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: “You have misunderstood me,” and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips—no former ones fitted more smoothly to your gums—to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness.

*

A is very puffed up, he thinks he is far advanced in goodness since, obviously as an object that is ever seductive, he feels himself exposed to ever more temptations from directions hitherto unknown to him. The proper explanation is however this: that a great devil has taken up residence in him and countless throngs of smaller ones come along to serve the great one.

*

“Know thyself” [Erkenne dich selbst] does not mean “Observe thyself.” “Observe thy self” is what the Serpent says. It means: “Make yourself master of your actions.” But you are so already, you are the master of your actions. So that saying means: “Misjudge yourself! [Verkenne dich] Destroy yourself!” which is something evil – and only if one bends down very far indeed does one also hear the good in it, which is: “In order to make of yourself what you are.”

*

There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people. They always stood by each other. If, for instance, one of them had made a stranger, someone outside their community, unhappy in some rather scoundrelly way—that is to say, again, nothing scoundrelly, but just what is usual, just the normal sort of thing—and he then confessed to the whole community, they investigated the case, judged it, imposed penances, pardoned, and the like. It was not badly meant, the interests of the individual members and of the community as a whole were strictly safeguarded, and he who was supplied with the complementary color to the color he had shown:

“What? You mean you are upset about that? But what you did was a matter of course, you acted as you were bound to. Anything else would be incomprehensible. You are in a nervous condition, that’s all. Pull yourself together and be sensible.” So they always stood by each other, and even after death they did not desert the community, but rose to heaven dancing in a ring. All in all it was a vision of the purest childlike innocence to see them fly. But since everything, when confronted with heaven, is broken up into its elements, they crashed, true slabs of rock.

*

If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair.

*

Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear when it is once more covered with dry leaves.

*

The main thing, when a sword cuts into one’s soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable.

*

This is a place where I never was before: here breathing is different, and more dazzling than the sun is the radiance of a star beside it.

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

More Kafka quotes

A conference with demons

Writing is a conference with demons, said Kafka. What does that mean? You’re not living, so you write, or you write because you don’t live. Somehow the two are intertwined, writing and death. And with every word you bite deeper into the apple. Writing begins to surround you, as you realise it always has. So you look around for a new beginning and you realise it’s already your end.

No writer should call himself a writer. When I speak of the sin of writing about myself – it’s a sin, to be sure, but who am I? Perhaps the sin is writing itself.

This my go-between to no one. In lieu of a line to God. A substitute for the strength to write to no one. A remainder of hope, or a hope against hope: strange phrase.

Muster the strength to say: begin again, from the end. From the ruin you’ve made of your life, that has been made of your life.

Alone yet not alone. All manner of voices obstruct my silence.

I write and writing ruins me: I can’t feel my mouth, my fingers, or rather I feel another mouth, other fingers, in these words that never meet or part.

I dreamed that writing wrote me.