Word: kafka
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...ordinary standards, Kafka's was a life in which practically nothing happened, a life as short and simple as a single day-and as terrible, not because its vicissitudes were overwhelming, but because, as in most life, they were endurable...
...barrier of dissolution, they may investigate in uncompetitive privacy the mysteries inaudible to the other minds. If they can recross the sonic sill, alive and sane, they may report what they have experienced to men who, never having known the experience, will never quite understand the report. Franz Kafka ventured across the barrier, reported with an apparent lucidity the cryptographs of silence, and was little understood. "Franz Kafka," wrote Franz Werfel, "was a messenger from above, a great chosen...
...area of silence which Kafka sought to decode, and which he succeeded at least in marvelously dramatizing, was that bleak void in which man, like a rat in a laboratory maze, strives frantically (and often ludicrously) to approach God, while God (with the detachment of the scientific mind) observes the data of the frenzy and the fun. Milton, in his blindness, sought "to justify the ways of God to men." The sum of Kafka's report was that the ways of God and man are irreconcilable...
...unconscious that he has incurred any guilt. Chance, the irrational number by which man confesses the failure of his intellectual algebra, may throw a man off course for a whole lifetime, and even beyond the grave. "When you have once been misled by bells tolling in the night," wrote Kafka, "you can never find the right path again...
...there any bypassing God. For, while men may try to forget or deny God, they cannot forget what Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called "the God-ache." Implicit or explicit in all Kafka's work, the source of his religious rage, his drama, irony, despair and compassion, is this incompatibility, this eternal misunderstanding of God by man-the inability of man to grasp, by limited human standards, the standards of divine Justice or divine Grace...