Tuesday, June 21, 2005

if kafka had a blog

It's hard not to make the comparison when you see the way The Kafka Project has designed the web publication of Paul Kerschen's translations of Franz's diaries from 1910-1923. Each day, a new entry arrives, sharing Kafka's thoughts on the mundane and the profound. (Via Maud Newton)

Today, for instance, I was rude three times, once to a conductor, once to someone introduced to me—so there were only 2, but they pain me like a stomachache. Coming from anyone else it would have been rude; how much more so coming from me...Though now I say to myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and the man you were introduced to kept calm, the latter even said goodbye as you went off. But that means nothing. You can achieve nothing when you fail yourself, but what else do you miss in your own circle? To this speech I answer only: even I would rather suffer blows inside the circle than strike blows myself outside of it, but where the hell is this circle—for a while, yes, I saw it lying on the earth, as if squirted out with chalk, but now it just hangs like this around me, it doesn’t even hang at all.

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