I’ve spent a good part of my life, reading Kafka. He’s a colossus. Not because he wrote so much but because what he did write was direct, authentic, a needle with damage that would do.
I walked around Prague with his Letters to Milenka under my arm, imagining Kafka walking these same streets, thinking the same thoughts as he walked to his dreary insurance company office. Never read or gaining fame in his life, he lived as he wrote - witness to a strange life of the interior, the imagination. A man of tragedy, burning most of his writing, never to find love, dying as he lived in a world that did not understand.
I highly recommend his letters. He was a man of letters and you’ll find the man within those words, so heartfelt and honest. I mourn that we no longer write letters or read letters. Our world is less, less sincere and authentic, for that.
Of course, read his short stories, plus his famous works like Metamorphosis, The Castle, The Judgement, The Trial. They explain the man too.
I wrote this piece below, a few decades ago. It stands as a testament to that time I lived in Bohemia, walking the same cobblestones as Kafka. My affinity with the man, a man who knew many secrets that our world should find and hold close. If you get the reference at the end, a big prize your way.
A Literary Autopsy
“Now, you have all the vitals. Josef K., male, 40. Eastern European, middle child, no dependents. Never married, profession: Insurance advocate.
“So, let’s get down to work. The first thing you notice immediately are the feet. Big. Too big – a duck out of water, clown’s feet, must have been uncomfortable walking through this world, on cobblestones especially. So too with all the extremities. Notice the ears and how they are reaching out to hear – almost to here! The hands. Too big for gloves. A murderer’s hands, always in need of clutching each other for fear of their fallen fate.”
“Now, let’s turn our attention to the eyes which some say are the keyhole of the soul. Dark, deep, moist, cavernous eyes. They have the look of too little sleep, of an active nether world, an always awakening dream. Calculating eyes, always wanting something which the other is unable to give. Long straight eyebrows that guard the inner sanctum in a plain yet threatening way.”
“Then, there’s the nose. Typical mensch, built to oxygenate the brain. Solomon’s sniffing snooze. Almost artificial, glued on, inhuman, primitive, as if it were bought from the golem maker along with the clown’s feet, for a show, to beckon some hidden force, then unceremoniously stuck on. A nose that knows.”
“Lips. Thin, always dry. Unkissed. Not those of a lover but one who wants to be loved. An intellectual’s lips. Well sealed to prevent secrets from escaping too soon, allowing ideas to be well digested.”
“Speaking of the digestive system, let’s now focus on the torso. Truly a perfect ectomorph. Emasculated, a human squirrel full of nervous energy, and unsettledness. But of the mind, not the body. The body wastes away on the stem of the mind. Thin, wiry, almost consumptive, the torso shows the effects of a high calorie burning organism. A man of immense hunger. A hunger artist. And it is this, I believe to be the key here. The digestive system is or should I say “was”, in a constant state of work, reconstituting experience. Life does not offer this man enough food to exist.”
“So, in a word, the cause of death: hunger. Perhaps he never found the food he liked – a forerunner of a more modern and endemic though less fatal disease known as nausea. A sickness of those who never seem to arrive at port. Which brings us to our next cadaver, a very interesting case, a young man found on a train from Bouville in the Gare de Montmartre in Paris. DOA, dead on arrival, no apparent trauma though ….”
Franz Kafka