Recently I started to read Kafka’s “Castle”. The story is charming me itself as it is, and i have a steady feeling that a man-me would have written the same way; but moreover the introduction before the story is simply wonderful. Written by an editor-translator, it’s definitely written from heart and, as it seems to me, with a charm that I feel towards Kafka myself. I would like to share the quotes from this Introduction in this article.
“True reality is always unrealistic”
“Look at the clarity, purity and truth of a Chinese coloured woodcut. To talk like that – that would be something.” Kafka makes pictures.
“He is always trying to explain the inexplicable. But he never explains.”
“Who can tell if the violin is silent when untouched by the bow?”
“Unconscious harmony is traded for conscious intellect, and mankind finds itself opposite and always opposite.”
“There’s a goal but no way,” says Kafka in one of his notes: “What we call a way is hesitation.”
“In every moment of life the material is same, only judgement differs.”
“.. hell and heaven are not separate places but a divided perception of the same world.”
Image by Andy Warhol