Word: human
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Comparing our present knowledge of the universe with human knowledge about the earth just before the discovery of America, Le Corbeillier points out that just as no one then could predict the number of undiscovered continents, so today the realm of undiscovered scientific knowledge seems infinite...
...unequivocal, masculine and as glitteringly clear as winter air. He is the least sentimental or feminine of modern writers. But truth and derangement are galley-mates, since the horror that tugs at the same oar is the perception that man and his fate by human standards are monstrous. Kafka retains his sanity by his realization that man's fate is also divine comedy. This is the hinge of his unearthly irony...
...Book of Job. If The Castle is a modern Pilgrim's Progress, The Trial is a 20th Century Book of Job. Like Job, Joseph K. is a good and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil. The Trial reports his oncreeping sense of guilt as a human being and the slow progress of that divine, intangible, but inexorable Justice to which he therefore feels that he must submit ("You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such...
Divine Justice is as preposterous (to human understanding) as divine Grace. The divine detectives who arrest Joseph K. are brassy louts who eat his breakfast, try to get a rake-off by sending out for his food, try to make off with his shirt and underwear. "Much better give these things to us than hand them over to the depot ... for in the depot there's lots of thieving, and besides they sell everything there after a certain length of time, no matter whether your case is settled or not. And you never know how long these cases will...
...rock. Then one of them drew out "a long, thin, double-edged butcher's knife, held it up and tested the cutting edge in the moonlight. . . . With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window [in the house] suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial, at that distance and at that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? . . . Was help at hand? . . . Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where...