K.

XV. Veiled Splendor

Kafka spent eight months in Zürau, in the Bohemian countryside, at his sister Ottla’s house, between September 1917 and April 1918. The tuberculosis had declared itself a month before, when he coughed up blood in the night. The sick man didn’t hide a certain sense of relief. Writing to Felix Weltsch, he compared himself to the “happy lover” who exclaims: “All the previous times were but illusions, only now do I truly love.” Illness was the final lover, which allowed him to close the old accounts. The first of those accounts was the idea of marriage, which had tortured him (and Felice) for five years. Another was his business career. Another was Prague and his family.

After arriving in Zürau, Kafka chose not to write anything the first day, because the place was “too pleasing” and he feared his every word would be “evil’s cue.” Whatever he wrote, before he thought of the reader he thought of demons — and of his unsettled account with them. Not even illness was enough to settle it.

Zürau was a tiny village among rolling hills, surrounded by scattered woods and meadows. The focal point of life there was the hop harvest. As for its inhabitants, animals were more in evidence than people. Kafka immediately saw the place as “a zoo organized according to new principles.” Ottla’s house was on the market square, beside the church. Except for the friends and relatives who threatened constantly to visit, the situation approached that reduction to the minimum number of elements toward which Kafka naturally tended in his writing — and which he would have liked to extend to his life in general.

In his only period of near happiness, he found himself surrounded by semi-free animals. Theirs, after all, was a condition quite familiar to him. There exists an invisible chain, of a generous length, that allows one to wander here and there without noticing it, as long as one doesn’t go too far in any single direction. If one does, the chain will suddenly make itself felt. But Kafka was never self-indulgent enough to view this state of affairs, as many do, as a dirty trick played on him alone. This is how he expressed it in the sixty-sixth Zürau aphorism, describing a “he” who signifies “anyone”:

He is a free and secure citizen of the earth, since he is bound by a chain long enough to allow free access to every place on earth, yet short enough that nothing can drag him beyond the earth’s confines. But at the same time he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven, since he is bound also by a heavenly chain that functions similarly. Thus he is choked if he tries to move toward the earth by his heavenly collar, and if he tries to move toward heaven, by his earthly one. And despite this, every possibility is his, he can feel it, indeed he refuses to trace this all back to an error made by chaining him in the first place.

Never does Kafka seem to find his situation as agreeable as he does during those months in Zürau. Only there can he escape everything: family, office, women — the principal powers that have always hounded him. Further, he is protected by the barrier of illness, which, as if by magic, now shows no “visible signs.” Indeed, Kafka will write to Oskar Baum, in a provocative parenthesis: “(on the other hand I’ve never felt better, as far as my health is concerned).” In Zürau the world has been nearly emptied of human beings. It’s this emptiness, above all else, that gives rise in Kafka to a feeling of slight euphoria. The animals remain: “A goose was fattened to death, the sorrel has mange, the nanny goats have been taken to the billy goat (who must have been quite a handsome fellow; one of the nannies, after having already been taken to him once, had a sudden flash of memory and ran the long road from our house back to the billy), and the pig will no doubt be butchered at any moment.” These words are enough to suggest the superimposed scenes of an ongoing tragicomedy. Kafka added: “This is a compressed image of life and death.” The reduction to the prime elements has been completed in a Bohemian village where the theater of life is left to the animals — and to the commonest of them. And it’s a relief. But, just as Strindberg had experienced, hell is ready to burst forth at any moment, heralded by noise. In Zürau, it will be the noise of mice.

We find the first account, like a war bulletin, in a letter to Felix Weltsch (mid-November 1917):

Dear Felix, the first great flaw of Zürau: a night of mice, a frightening experience. I am unscathed and my hair is no whiter than yesterday, but it was the most horrifying thing in the world. For some time now I’ve heard them here and there (my writing is continually interrupted, you’ll soon see why), every now and then at night I’ve been hearing a soft nibbling, once I even got out of bed, trembling, to take a look, and then it stopped at once — but this time it was an uproar. What a dreadful, mute, and noisy race. At two I was awakened by a rustling near my bed and it didn’t let up from then until morning. Up the coal box, down the coal box, crossing the room diagonally, running in circles, nibbling the woodwork, whistling softly when not moving, and all the while the sensation of silence, of the clandestine labor of an oppressed proletarian race to whom the night belongs.

But wasn’t it Kafka himself to whom the night belonged? Now he discovered that beside him, behind him, above him, the same belief held sway among an “oppressed proletarian race” that worked without respite. His anxiety was brought on more than anything else by the sensation that those multitudes had “already perforated all the surrounding walls a hundred times, and were lying in wait there.” (This was the same race that was waiting, unseen, to obsess the builder of “The Burrow,” who one day said: “What an incessantly industrious race and how bothersome their zeal can be.”) Their smallness rendered them elusive and unattackable, and thus all the more terrifying. As for Kafka’s coveted nocturnal solitude, it now seemed more like confinement at the center of a porous surface, pierced by countless malevolent eyes.

After that first night, no matter to whom he was writing — whether Brod or Baum or Weltsch — Kafka spoke of mice. The subject lent itself to endless variations, all the more so when Kafka introduced, in self-defense, the presence of a cat, which raised further questions: “I can drive the mice away using the cat, but then how will I drive the cat away? Do you imagine you have nothing against mice? Naturally, you don’t have anything against cannibals either, but if at night they crept out from under all the cupboards gnashing their teeth, you surely couldn’t bear them any longer. Anyway, I’m now trying to harden myself, observing the field mice on my walks; they’re not so bad, but my room isn’t a field and sleeping isn’t walking.” The same amalgam of the outrageously comic and the appalling — a gift of Kafka’s, like the mysterious irreducibility of certain Shakespearean verses — characterizes all his epistolary accounts of the Zürau mice, out of which will someday grow the speculations of “The Burrow” and the events of “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” The “mouse folk” would remain for Kafka the ultimate image of community.

Brod, who could lend a touch of kitsch to anything, described Kafka’s stay in Zürau as an “escape from the world into purity.” He also viewed it — he wrote to his friend — as a “successful and admirable” enterprise. It would be hard to find two adjectives that irritated Kafka more. He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was “not suicide, but the thought of suicide.” If he didn’t go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: “You who can’t manage to do anything, you want to do this?” And here was his closest friend speaking to him of success, of admiration, of purity. In his reply, Kafka invoked for the first time (the only other instance was in his Letter to His Father) the final sentence of The Trial, applying it to himself: “It seemed as though the shame must outlive him.”

On September 15, after three days in Zürau, Kafka wrote: “You have the chance, if ever there was one, to begin again. Don’t waste it.” He had understood the manifestation of his illness as a provisional leave of absence from the torment of normal life. He was entering what would prove to be a unique period. Looking back on his time in Zürau, he would one day write to Milena, referring to himself in the second person: “Consider also that what may have been the best period of your life, which you haven’t yet spoken about adequately to anyone, were those eight months in a village, about two years ago, when you thought you had settled every account, when you confined yourself only to that which is unquestionably within you, without letters, without the five-year postal connection to Berlin, protected by your illness, and when you didn’t have to change much of yourself, but had only to retrace more firmly the old narrow features of your being (your face, beneath the gray hair, has hardly changed since you were six).” Confining his own field of action to what lay “unquestionably” within himself seems to have been Kafka’s lifelong aim. But if there was a time when he tried to pursue it with absolute rigor, in part because his external circumstances conspired to assist (“the voices of the world becoming quieter and less numerous”), it was during the Zürau months. It is in this context that we must understand, as a kind of daring experiment made possible only under these conditions, the appearance of a new form: the aphorism. New first of all in a physical, tactile sense: Kafka typically wrote, in pen or in pencil, in school notebooks, barely even marking divisions between one text and the next as he filled them; now, however, he puts together a sequence of 103 individual slips of onionskin paper, each measuring 14.5 centimeters by 11.5 centimeters, each containing, with rare exceptions, a single numbered fragment, generally aphoristic. The sequence has no title. Brod’s suggestion—Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way—is both appealing and, in its solemnity, misleading, but it rightly suggests the fact that these slips of paper constitute the only text in which Kafka directly confronts theological themes. If there is a theology in Kafka, this is the only place where he himself comes close to declaring it. But even in these aphorisms, abstraction is rarely permitted to break free of the image to live its own life, as if it has to serve time for having been autonomous and capricious for too long, in that remote and reckless age when philosophers and theologians still existed.

Prior to transcribing them on those slips of onionskin, Kafka had written the Zürau aphorisms in two octavo notebooks, among other fragments, some of the same nature and equally penetrating. The numbering follows, almost without exception, the order in which the aphorisms appear in the two notebooks. It is thus impossible to attribute to the sequence a reasoned organization, as we can for example in the case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It’s also impossible to determine why some of the aphorisms on the onionskin sheets are crossed out: they are not of a particular type, and what’s more, some of them are among the most noteworthy. Kafka himself never alluded to these aphorisms either in letters or in his other writings. No evidence exists, therefore, not even indirect evidence, that he intended to publish them. But their very mode of presentation suggests a book of roughly a hundred pages, where each page would correspond to one of the slips of onionskin. This book is like a pure diamond, buried among the vast carboniferous deposits of Kafka’s interior. It would be pointless to seek, among twentieth-century collections of aphorisms, another as intense and enigmatic. If published one after the other, these fragments would occupy twenty or so pages and would be almost suffocating — because each fragment is an aphorism in the Kierkegaardian sense, an “isolated” entity, which must be surrounded by an empty space in order to breathe. This need explains the point of transcribing them one to a page. But even the definition of aphorism is misleading, if we understand that word as currently used to mean “maxim.” Some of these fragments are narrative (for example, 8/9, 10, 20, 107), others are single images (15, 16, 42, 87), and others are parables (32, 39, 88). We find a similarly various texture in Kafka’s Diaries, but here every redundancy, every arbitrariness, every insistency, has been stripped away. In their terseness and in their deceptive clarity, these sentences have an air of finality. They are the rapid brushstrokes of an exceedingly old master, who distills everything into these brief flicks of his wrist, guided by an “eye that simplifies to the point of utter desolation.” That’s how Kafka defined his gaze in a letter of that period.

It’s pointless to set the Zürau aphorisms beside some of the pinnacles of the past. The comparison skews, as though resting on an unstable base. If Kafka writes that “impatience and inertia” are “man’s two deadly sins, from which all the others derive,” it’s futile to look elsewhere for related sentences, whether comparable or conflicting, on the same themes. The same is true when he writes of the three forms of free will, concluding that the three forms are really one and don’t presuppose any will, free or not. Why is this the case? Perhaps because he had “a kind of congenital indifference to received ideas.” Even to the great received ideas. One always gets the impression that Kafka lacked common ground with other great writers, even though he venerated at least a few of them (Pascal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard). But the peculiarity of his aphorisms, their steep, irreducible singularity, reaches such heights as to allow comparison only with other fragments marked by the same peculiarity. Kafka can communicate only with Kafka — and he can’t always do that. It’s hard to tell just how aphorism 8/9—which speaks only of a “stinking bitch, which has littered many times and is already decomposing in places”—relates to those that come before or after it. Indeed Brod quietly deleted it. (Perhaps he thought it clashed with the noble title he had chosen.) And yet this sequence is precisely where all randomness or connection through mere juxtaposition is denied. It’s the only instance of Kafka’s taking pains to give one of his works a visually and spatially unambiguous shape, almost to the point of determining the typographical layout. Each of those sentences presents itself as if the greatest possible generality were intrinsic to it. And at the same time each seems to emerge from vast deposits of dark matter.

Max Brod was a tireless practitioner of a style of psychological analysis not very different from what would one day become the preferred style in women’s magazines, though his is denser and fuzzier and has occasional theological complications. Every so often he dared to provoke Kafka: “Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?” Kafka replied as if from an astral distance: “You write: ‘Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?’ And just before that: ‘I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.’ If you conjoin these two sentences, it’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?’”

Kafka was not a collector of theologies. The word itself was not congenial to him. He rarely named the gods, and he resorted to ruses in order not to attract their attention. To believe in a personal God seemed to him to be, above all else, one of the ways of allowing the “indestructible something” in us to “remain hidden.” That’s the enigmatic formulation found in the fiftieth Zürau aphorism.

He generally spoke of the gods in an oblique fashion. One might argue that his boldest assertion is concealed in a line of his Diaries that says only: “The passage in Hebel’s letter on polytheism.” The reference is to a letter from Johann Peter Hebel to F. W. Hitzig, where one reads: “If the Theological Society still existed, this time I would have written a paper for them on polytheism. I confess to you — since a confession between friends is no less sacred than one before the altar — that it seems more and more obvious to me, and that only the state of captivity and childishness we’re kept in by the faith in which we’re baptized and raised and subjected to homilies has prevented me until now from erecting little churches to the blessed gods.”

Taking all this into account, Kafka’s embarrassment — when subjected by Brod to the manuscript of his most ambitious opus, which would appear in 1921 in two volumes totaling 650 pages, bearing the vaguely grotesque title Paganism Christianity Judaism—could not have been small. Brod had lavished on this book his talent for frightening oversimplification.

Kafka read the manuscript immediately and offered Brod his thoughts on it in a letter. At first we find rather general praise. Then, having endured long explanations of what constitutes paganism, Kafka takes the opportunity to say what the ancient Greeks mean to him — using arguments that have nothing to do, not even polemically, with Brod’s book. Instead we look on with astonishment as Kafka sketches a vision of Greece that includes himself in one corner, like the donor in a medieval altarpiece:

In short, I don’t believe in “paganism” as you define it. The Greeks, for example, were perfectly familiar with a certain dualism, otherwise what could we make of moira and other such concepts? It’s just that they were a rather humble people — as far as religion is concerned — a sort of Lutheran sect. As for the decisively divine, they could never imagine it far enough from themselves; the whole world of the gods was only a way to keep that which was decisive at a distance from the earthly body, to provide air for human breath. It was a great method of national education, which held and linked the gaze of the people, and it was less profound than Hebrew law, but perhaps more democratic (no leaders or founders of religions here), perhaps freer (it held and linked them, but I don’t know with what), perhaps humbler (because their vision of the gods’ world gave rise to this awareness: so, we are not gods at all, and if we were gods, what would we be?). The closest I can come to your conception might be to say: in theory, there exists a perfect earthly possibility for happiness, that is, to believe in the decisively divine and not to aspire to attain it. This possibility for happiness is as blasphemous as it is unattainable, but the Greeks were perhaps closer to it than many others.

“In theory, there exists a perfect earthly possibility for happiness, that is, to believe in the decisively divine and not to aspire to attain it”: that’s from the letter to Brod (1920). “In theory, there exists a perfect possibility for happiness: to believe in the indestructible within us and not to aspire to attain it”: this is from the sixty-ninth Zürau aphorism (1918). The sentence in the letter reiterates the aphorism, except for one point: where the aphorism speaks of “the indestructible,” the letter speaks of “the decisively divine.” This is the only time Kafka hints at what he means by “the indestructible.” Now we at least know that “the decisively divine” can be superimposed on it. (But what do we make of that “decisively”?) As for the word indestructible, it appears exclusively in four of the 109 Zürau aphorisms. It certainly makes for memorable sentences, but why did that word appear only there? Why was it never explained? Why was it chosen?

Appearances can be fleeting, inconsistent, deceptive. But at a certain point one encounters something unyielding. Kafka called it “the indestructible.” This word brings to mind the Vedic akshara more than it does any term used in less remote traditions. Kafka chose never to explain its meaning. He wanted only to distinguish it clearly from any faith in a “personal God.” Indeed he went so far as to assert that “belief in a personal God” is nothing more than “one possible expression” of a widespread phenomenon: the tendency of “the indestructible” to “remain hidden.” And yet “man cannot live without an ever-present trust in something indestructible within himself.” Those who act (and everyone without exception acts) can’t help feeling, during the moment in which they act, immortal. And what could lead a man to this mirage if not a vague awareness of “something indestructible within himself”? The indestructible is something we can’t help noticing, like the sensation of being alive. But what the indestructible might be tends to remain hidden from us. And perhaps it’s best that way.

Kafka treated paradise in six of the Zürau aphorisms (3, 64, 74, 82, 84, 86). That these are linked to the ones that treat the indestructible is made clear: “If that which must have been destroyed in paradise was destructible, then it wasn’t decisive; but, if it was indestructible, then we’re living in a false belief.” For Kafka, the whole world was “a false belief”—and that was the subject of his writings: the enormous, inexhaustible, tortuous developments of that false belief. Where did they originate? In a fatal misunderstanding regarding the two trees that grow in the center of paradise. Humans are convinced that they were kicked out of that place for eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But this is an illusion. That wasn’t their sin. Their sin lay in not having yet eaten from the Tree of Life. The expulsion from paradise was a pretext to prevent them from doing just that. We are sinful not because we were kicked out of paradise but because our expulsion has rendered us unable to perform one task: to eat from the Tree of Life.

Kafka, who was ill with knowledge, in the end devalued knowledge. In fact, he tells us with hidden sarcasm, “After original sin we have been essentially equal in our capacity to know good and evil.” All the differences we pride ourselves on are of little importance, because “the true differences begin beyond that knowledge.” But what can such a knowledge be, which begins beyond knowledge? Simply the “effort to act in accordance with it.” Here every mental construction comes to ruin, for that capacity simply wasn’t given to us. And in our vain attempt to put knowledge into action, we can only fail. For man that means: to die. Kafka adds, in parentheses: “Perhaps this is also the original meaning of natural death.” Man dies, then, because he “must destroy himself” in his anxiety to act in accord with whatever knowledge he possesses. And meanwhile he overlooks the Tree of Life, whose leafy branches continue rustling, intact. This process, this trial, is in progress at every moment. For Kafka, paradise wasn’t a place where people lived in the past and of which a memory has survived, but rather a perennial, hidden presence. In every moment, an immense, encompassing obstacle prevents us from seeing it. That obstacle is nothing other than the expulsion from paradise — a process Kafka called “eternal in its principal aspect.”

But what might that “principal aspect” be? Only the terrible misunderstanding about knowledge. This is a truth that partakes of the “unconsoling” nature of the good, but it also, we soon realize, implies something that no one any longer would dare to hope: if the expulsion from paradise is an “eternal process”—at least in its “principal aspect”—then that “makes it possible not only that we will be able to remain permanently in paradise, but also that in fact we are permanently there, and it doesn’t matter whether we know it here or not.” Like the indestructible, paradise too may remain hidden. Indeed, in the normal course of life it does. Perhaps only in this way is life possible. Yet we recall that “we were created to live in paradise”—and nowhere does it say that the intended purpose of paradise has been changed. Hence everything that happens does so, “in its principal part,” in paradise, even if during the very moment in which we are being expelled.

Magic was discredited primarily by those who equated it with a kind of creation, and creation was thought to have operated ex nihilo. Doubly naïve. Kafka never wrote about magic, but he had an exact notion of it, so exact that he was able to define it once with sovereign coolness: “It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies — not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.” The worship of idols is more than anything an attempt to evoke life’s splendor with names that are, time after time, right. Such a recognition ought to be sufficient to put an end to the atavistic struggle against the gods — a struggle that fails to understand that the singular is one modality of the plural, and the plural one way to catch a flashing glimpse of the veiled splendor.

In his first days in Zürau, Kafka wrote these lines: “O beautiful hour, masterful state, garden gone wild. You turn from the house and see, rushing toward you on the garden path, the goddess of happiness.” A goddess he named only that once.