Roberto Calasso - K.

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.