Valerio ADAMI, Excelsior, 2009

Turning back to Stach’s Kafka, some resonances and reverberations:

“Kafka had a strong preference for deep conversations with a small group of friends, and if confronted with too many faces and voice, he tended to sink into daydreams–and look almost apathetic–or slip into the role of an intent and smiling but silent observer. Both reactions were perceived as aloofness, and Kafka’s prim and proper clothing, only heightened this impression, and so it too patience and empathy not to misread his appearance as an affectation.”

“Nevertheless, this friendship [Kafka and Felix Weltsch] never developed the intensity of Kafka’s bond with Brod–even Weltsch’s written recollections of Kafka are oddly bland–most likely because Weltsch did not look to writing for existential expression and was therefore shielded from the torments of literary productivity. Both were after the truth. For Kafka, this pursuit remained a problem of linguistic and visual expression, burdened with a great many subjective reservations and the profound skepticism about language that was quite widespread at the turn of the century, while Weltsch’s approach to philosophical problems was based on his view that education and precise thinking were the best routes to solutions.”

“Many a book,” he wrote to Oskar Pollak, “seems like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”

“Instead, Kafka pursued these perplexing trains of thought as a reader of literature, keenly observing the waves of mutually enhancing associations that emanated from them. If they welled up with particular intensity, he concluded that he had touched on an inner, subjective truth of which he had been unaware until that moment–a process he was able to grasp only on imagery.”