My coles notes:
Kafka was a privileged child and probably a little bit too
coddled. He was unprepared for the realities of adult life in his time and was
grandiose, existential, and basically dramatic in his reflection of his
experience.
He rebelled against his father and his heritage, hated his
9-5 job, and as he matured into his 30’s he began to revisit and appreciate his
family and his culture…. All normal. Throughout his life, he was self-absorbed
by his writing and art, and did not get married. I think if I were to meet
Kafka today and have to listen to him drone on I might roll my eyes.
Kafka led a double life because of his drive to create and
loathing of his profession as an insurance lawyer. He worked a 9-5 job and
spent his evenings and weekends in existential thought and creation. He talked
about atrophy-ing all of his other senses because he felt he needed to focus on
writing and put all of his energy in that endeavor. When he contracted TB, his
existential reflection went into overdrive and this combination of focus and
depravity became especially thematic. The perspective he lived in eventually
drove him insane and he died as a recluse in a sanitarium at 40 years old having
refused to publish most of his work. It was only after his death that we really
got to read Kafka.
I have always thought of Kafka’s work as a little disturbing
and surreal. I thought that this may have been the translation. Knowing his
history helps me understand what it is all about. His work is a commentary on
an oppressed society and the monotony of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in
the newly industrialized world. His work is surreal because the world that he
lived in felt surreal to him… as it sometimes does to all of us. This is what
makes Kafka appealing to me; the unconscious comfort and familiarity which
satisfies my secret existential wonderings.
“When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply
folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the
office, but by my other work. The office has an innocent share in it only to
the extent that, if I did not have to go there I could live calmly for my own
work and not have to waste these 6 hours a day which have tormented me to a
degree that you cannot imagine, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I
was full of my own things. In the final analysis; I know, that is just talk,
the fault is mine and the office has the right to make the most definite and
justified demands on me. But for me in particular it is a horrible double life
from which there is probably no escape but insanity.”
-Franz Kafka, Bohemian
Library, University of Oxford
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