I recently finished watching The Wire for the second time thru and had completely forgotten the Kafka quote Walon shares with Bubs in the last episode of the series:

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”

I looked up the quote after and spent a long time not just thinking about it, but also just trying to understand it. It seems that Kafka is talking about the futility of trying to avoid suffering, both on your part and by others, and by trying to avoid this suffering, you are in fact inflicting the only type of pain that is outside of and extraneous to existence. Kafka seems concerned throughout this short work with the weight of consciousness, and how what we consider “humanity” as a trait is often more of a burden than a blessing. In the fifth season of The Wire, we watch Bubs struggle with guilt over his life as an addict, unwilling to accept good things happening to him from a feeling that he doesn’t deserve them. Instead of facing his suffering, he buries it in self-hatred.

I sought out this book after watching that episode. I’ve read most of Kafka’s major works, and I’d come across his aphorisms and parables in excerpts without ever having dove into them. I found this collect of 100-some aphorisms a bit off putting. Scattered throughout are some great examples of the gnomic, post-logic imagery that characterizing the best of Kafka’s work. Like the best practitioners of surrealism, Kafka has a way of finding an exact combination of words and images to touch a spot deep in your brain that you can feel, but cannot express. In this way, Kafka’s work is very hard to talk about and analyze - the work speaks for itself and defies summary. I’m thinking of aphorisms like:

The variety of views that one may have, say, of an apple: the view of the small boy who has to crane his neck for a glimpse of the apple on the table, and the view of the master of the house who picks up the apple and hands it to a guest.

Or,

A cage went in search of a bird.

To try and explain these brief images is to break their crystalline nature - the best we can do is pass light through their prism and examine the spectrum of feeling that they cast. It’s this rebellion against explication and literalism that has always drawn me to Kafka, and has always given me an odd sensation when I read about his life that seems so different to my experience with other writers: whereas literature often gives the sensation that an author who lived hundreds of years ago is sitting in the room with you, Kafka’s lifetime always shocks me for how relatively recent it is. This isn’t to say that his work feels outdated, rather just that it exists out of time.

Unfortunately many of the aphorisms in this book aren’t classically Kafka and many seem to be reaching into areas of explicit theology and philosophy that I just don’t think he was quite as adept in. Many of these aphorisms I had to read several times over to try and understand what he was getting at, and most I still didn’t get. Gnomic and allusive isn’t the same as unclear and confusing. Curiously, it seems that as Kafka got more specific about ideas, the more abstract was the work he produced. He’s just not an author who I go to look for something as banal as an opinion, or god forbid, advice. Some of the aphorisms in this book verge dangerously close into that territory. I will say, the short length and tracts of white space that surround each aphorism make it easy to blow through this book in an hour or so - some of these seem they would be better to pin to a wall, or like Walon in The Wire, keep in your pocket scrawled on a scrap for years. This way, through slow and accumulated reading and contemplation, the idea can reveal itself against the changing backdrop of time and circumstance.
( )

97/16-΄Οταν συνέχεια πας κόντρα στη μοίρα . Εκπληκτική αφήγηση και απολύτως κατανοητό θέμα. Δυστυχώς το βιβλίο δεν έχει τέλος . Τα δυο τελευταία κεφάλαια είναι απογοητευτικά ( )

Never thought I'd give only 3 stars to Kafka, but on the heels of La Rochefoucauld and Lichtenberg, Kafka's aphoristic craft just didn't leave much of an impression on my mind. There were a couple that stood out, certainly; and enough to warrant another read or two. Perhaps with my expectations now calibrated, I will yield fruit on a subsequent reading. ( )

Some of my favorite words ever written. One I return to again and again. Always rich with wisdom. ( )

Philosophy and Literature do not interact as often in modern times. Novelists spend more time trying to be clever and Philosophers reinterpreting earlier canonical works instead of thinking up new ideas.

Franz Kafka, however, was interested in Hasidism. A certain contemplation of human nature is found in all of his books. This leads one to think that a slim volume of Philosophical musing by Kafka would be a great find. Taken from the Octavo Notebooks, and compiled together in order, these are the source of many of the most famous quotes by Kafka.

Most of these ( )