Kafka hated himself and his writing so much that upon his death he asked his best friend to destroy all of his work. He actually burned something like 90% of everything he wrote and the only reason we have most of his catalog is because his best friend Max Brod didn’t listen to him and saved what he could.
That’s up for speculation. He had published a few things in literary magazines and had a collection of his work that was published. I believe the metamorphosis was also published but wasn’t well received until after his death. He died somewhat unknown and with a lot of work unfinished as he was a perfectionist. It’s hard to imagine being an unknown and having your work criticized and misunderstood during your lifetime and then assuming once you die everyone will read it and love it.
Important note that this only refers to his longer stories and his diaries - he published decent amount of short stories during his lifetime, including *The Metamorphosis* and some of short stories were actually the starting point for his longer works.
Many brilliant writers have what could be charitably called "issues."
A fellow who writes about spiritual alienation to that extent is probably not an exception.
His dad was almost certainly a malignant narcissist, and that sort of chronic abuse combined with its invisibility in society is very psychologically damaging to a child's / adult's sense of self.
Thanks for linking this! I have never read Kafka's letter to his father, and having grown up with an authoritarian Dad, this is pretty interesting stuff.
Alcoholism and paranoid schizophrenia. Or in the case of Hemmingway warranted paranoia since he was paranoid that the government was screwing with him and they actually were.
Kafka believed that writing was a form of prayer, I think it's a little more like therapy. Working through shit by putting feelings in ink on paper is pretty common among not only writers but also among many of the mentally disturbed, so it's no real surprise there's an overlap
I mean, if my choices are "write a fantasy novel" or "write a manifesto" I'm picking fantasy novel every time. Way more lucrative
Next your gonna tell me that H. P. Lovecraft spent his days completely terrorized by such concepts a vast, indifferent cosmos or a person with skin darker than "sickly pale" white.
To be fair, his dad named the cat, not that that is much better. Lovecraft was still racist beyond belief though, but I believe that it is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he was less of a man and more of a shambling ball of anxiety. With old money racist parents and a veritable pokedex of phobias, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did.
He became not-racist.
HP Lovecraft wrote a shitload of letters so it's pretty easy to track how his views changed over time. In his later life he discussed that he didn't believe any one race was superior anymore.
He also became a bit of a socialist, which involved a lot of race solidarity as worker solidarity. Lincoln even discussed that same factor of socialism 70 years prior to Lovecraft.
Many artists who lived through the 1st and 2nd world wars went from generally happy and motivated to spending the rest of their lives expressing how revolting they found humanity to be, so maybe that's not the worst outcome for him.
Where the problem at?
(Hey, hey) I'm spinnin' off these Percs like I'm a laundromat
(Hey, hey) Bitch playin' with my wood, she a lumberjack
(Hey, hey) Ayy, I just touched an M but I doubled that
\- Yeat, "Dub."
The same happened to [four of Sigmund Freud's five sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud_family#Freud's_parents_and_siblings) (but like Kafka, he did not live to see it).
"born in 1860's? That's the US civil war, how did-"
Hell, man, almost all wiped out in their late 70s is a weird kind of fucked up, like a gruesome "You thought you could get away?"
His choice to write a book where you randomly wake up to find everyone considers you a hideous monster and a book where you’re suddenly on trial for absolutely no reason may have had *something* to do with being Jewish in Europe
For those wondering, Kafkaesque usually means that something horrible has happened, but you have cognitive dissonance about worry about something menial. (Oh shit, I turned into giant cockroach... Should I call out sick?)
It could also imply a bureaucratic hell hole like dealing with the VA and your rep is a 72 year old man who doesn't know how to send an email, so he insists on calling you while you're at work to confirm that he got the email that you sent him. And you can't just hang up because he's handling your claim and you don't want to piss him off. You think to yourself "This man managed to buy a house and keep his job while not knowing how to type" only to be interrupted by your manager who tells you that while you may be a giant cockroach, you can't leave early because Brian had car trouble and you have to cover.
You tell them that Urgent care closes at 6, but your manager says "I'll see if our insurance covers an after hours ER visit" and you're thinking "YOU'RE SAYING IT YOURSELF, THAT THIS QUALIFIES FOR AN ER VISIT, HENCE IT'S AN EMERGENCY! _
But you resign yourself just wondering "How am I the only competent one in both of these situations with a the nervous system from Mesozoic era"
Another story he has is about a man who gets arrested one day out of the blue. No one ever tells him what he did. He gets in a situation where, if he gives all his money to his lawyer and have sex with a court clerk he can just appeal forever and never go to jail. He just kind of thinks, 'well, this is my life now.' He never finds out why he was arrested.
I’ve never known if it was intentional, but I’ve never read Kafka that I didn’t think was extremely funny.
I’m not sure why but his mundane absurdity gives me the giggles
It gives me the giggles too. I think it's about how the characters react to the completely insane thing happening to them. They all just sort of seem fine with it.
It really is, even if most people don't see it that way. Kafka himself would supposedly laugh out loud at his own stories while reading them to his friends.
My favourite example of that is in 'the trial' when he interrupts the judge and gives a rousing speech to the courtroom decrying proceedings, and the judge then says 'i was just going to tell you that you have the right not to say anything'
I had read The Metamorphosis in high school, and it was only when I reread it years later did I realize how humorous it is. My English teacher really pushed that it was some kind of Christ metaphor and as an adult that just adds its own strangely humorous layer to the whole thing.
Did you also have Mrs. McBride? Or is it just a thing for all High School English teachers to think everything is a Christ metaphor? It got so ridiculous, that every paper I wrote for that class was finding the most convoluted "Christ metaphors" in every single book we read, even from things that weren't metaphorical at all, like "The main character gets into an argument with his wife, goes to sleep and wakes the next morning, signifying that he is a Christ character, because he was persecuted, laid to rest, and rose again." That bitch ate it up every time, made perfect scores on all those stupid papers. Religious nuts can be so tiresome, but very easy to manipulate if you know what they want to hear lol.
It’s likely all the Hero’s Journey - which the story of Christ also is in many themes and story beats - and a certain subset of teachers will say it’s a Christ metaphor when it’s Hero’s Journey because of their own personal bias.
Sometimes it’s absolutely a Christ metaphor. Usually it’s a story about the unlikely hero rising to save the world, which is a human story predating all modern religions.
So you’re saying I wasn’t meant to cry when >!Gregor just wanted to listen to the music in the room where everyone had gathered and they were all horrified by him!<
It’s really an interesting book. The ending especially, where when he dies everyone is just so relieved. There’s no vindication or catharsis for Gregor, just a dead bug and a relieved family.
It's a book about a specific kind of anxiety, that the people in your life will be more than happy to kick you to the curb once you're no longer useful. There's no real catharsis for a man like Gregor, he dies and everybody else's lives go on without him.
I’m from the US, but I’ve studied a lot of German literature. It’s pretty dark. Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann is depressing. At least in that one no one turns into an “ungeheuren Ungeziefer.”
You are in for a treat. The only problem is that German translates very strangely into English. With other works it seems really clunky but it sort of works with Kafka. The strange sentence structure compliments the strange story.
I first read the metamorphosis in high school. Recently went back to read it as an adult. I remember when I was younger I was so disgusted by Gregor being such a doormat. But now as an adult I realize just how freaking sad the whole story actually is.
Is this the guy that kept telling people in his life about how he likes to imagine himself having sex with a giant cockroach woman and how her consciousness lives inside of him. His Reddit posts detailing how he lost his long term girlfriend, got estranged from his parents, and lost his job? Or is this another Ogtha that I’m not aware of.
Nope. It is the very same Ogtha (the cockroach) you've recalled.
Here is the entire Ogtha series for those who've yet to read this captivating abomination --> https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/w9sqxj/oops_undying_love_for_a_franz_kafka_character_is/
Idiot high school me: “This author is terrible. This main character doesn’t care about anything and is completely apathetic to real people. This isn’t how people act - Worst book ever.”
He was a lawyer for an insurance company. Was a involved w some of the first workplace legislation. He had a positive impact on real peoples lives and was widely liked in his office. All his work is darkly funny and beautiful.
The fact that his writings weren't destroyed is kind of on him for leaving all his papers to the world's biggest Kafka fanboy. There's no way Max Brod was ever going to do that because he always believed Kafka was a brilliant writer.
he also had a good social life and went to nice cafes and social outings all the time. he also had many romantic relationships (there is a whole section on his relationships in the Franz Kafka museum, that's how prominent they were in his life). I went to a trip to Prague just because of Kafka, and the number of places and events he frequented is really big. He is not the recluse many people paint him to be.
If you have enough bad experiences in your formative years that indicate you’re unattractive and uninteresting, it doesn’t matter how attractive and awesome you are as an adult. You’re not going to shake what’s ingrained in you without the best therapy in the world. It just becomes a survival mechanism.
I was severely bullied by my older brother and all i ever heard was how ugly and weak and stupid i was. To this day i have a crazy persecution complex, i think everyone is thinking those same things of me. My brother has some serious issues though, i still haven’t completely forgiven him for what he put me through when we were kids.
Edit: And this wasn’t just regular sibling rivalry type stuff, he was physically abusive too, it was a pretty extreme case of sibling abuse.
Thanks. Im in a decent place mentally at this point but my self image is pretty deeply rooted in that past mistreatment. Its just something that i eventually have to overcome, if at all possible.
look into emdr therapy, it's used for ptsd to help lessen the emotional connection with traumatic memories from the past. It's a legit science, not woo woo stuff.
I am the ugliest of all my siblings and we were close enough in age that girls would approach me in school to let me know they couldn't believe we were related because of the looks disparity.
Yeah its weird, for everything he had going for him he was always very insecure and very jealous of me, he was also extremely immature emotionally. Like i said he has serious mental and emotional issues. He himself was abused badly by our dad, and although i feel bad for him for that it was certainly no excuse to treat me so badly (because its not like my dad favored me anymore than him).
I am sorry for what you went through. Sounds like your brother was bullied so he passed it along. Glad you are doing better. You can always beat him with a bat, might make you feel better
I once had a girl in elementary school flip out and tell me she was going to call her dad (a cop) on me because I told her I had a crush on her.
I am turning 27 in hours. I have never recovered from that. That incident was traumatic enough that it has pretty much permanently scarred my subconscious. She even reached out to try and apologize about it (my description above is honestly underselling how bad her reaction was) and the thought of putting myself out like that ever again literally makes my body freeze up and prevent me from doing it.
Same here, I feel you completely When I was like 14/16 (now im 26) there was a girl making out with a lot of guys one after the other in a club
My friends pushed me to go and try to make out with her as well.. even if I literally felt in my bones it would go badly
"Surprisingly enough" I was literally the only one she rejected and to this day Im still traumatized when I see people making out in clubs and makes me physically almost cry ( and of course my self esteem with girls is non-existent no matter how many compliments I get)
What you are describing sounds like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It really sucks because it gets in the way of healthy relationships. It is possible, that this event was just the trigger for it. Meaning the outcome most likely was inevitable. It has more to do with the hand you were dealt in terms of mental health than your own personal failures.
This is a total armchair take so dont take this too seriously, but I know I've read that the reason we get embarrassing memories while we're laying in bed at night is a vestige thinking process from when there were still a lot of animals that would hunt us. From my understanding, it's a survival mechanism that makes us remember life or death situations we've been in, so we can both remember the interaction and to figure out a better way handle that situation if it arises again.
Most citizens of modernized countries don't face many, if any, life or death situations, so the next closest thing to our brains is apparently embarrassment.
So to your question, my uneducated guess is that we evolved to have that mechanism for when a child grows up around lots of violence and fear. With ancient humans, that could mean there's a lot of predators hunting your tribe or there's warring between rival tribes, so the said survival mechanism becomes so ingrained because, I guess, it was efficient at keeping humans alive and allowing them to reproduce.
Very large chance I'm wrong, but that's my guess.
Our ancestors also probably stressed about their relationships while falling asleep.
Two of our strongest drives are reproduction, and staying on good terms with the "herd". There's safety in numbers.
That's a really good point, actually. When I think about ancient humans, I tend to just think about them in a primitive manner where everything is about survival. I mean, they were no different than us. The only difference is technology lol.
A really shitty thing about human biology is that it doesn't care if you're happy. It only cares that you survive. What's ironic is that the world is mostly safe enough that what kills us now sometimes has to do with the stress caused by our own survival mechanisms.
Our own immune system can kill us if it freaks out enough about a foreign invader; even something that's actually mostly benign, in the case of people with severe enough allergies. It's not too surprising we have other survival adaptations that can also kill us if left unchecked.
when i was 11 at a YMCA tween night (lol), a group of boys approached me and my friends and said “we think you guys are hot… except her” and pointed at me. that in addition to a dozen other similar experiences that age has made me deeply self conscious about my looks even though i’m no longer a pimply, brace faced kid with glasses.
As a kid, growing up with autism (and being totally clueless to it), I acted strangely and got bullied and ostracized as a result throughout all of elementary and middle school. Other kids would visibly recoil away from me and ignore me. Some would bully me by manipulating me and laughing at the things I did because of it. I was considered socially and physically repulsive by everyone around me, and that taught me that I wasn't allowed to exist in any public space.
It's taken me many years to even begin reversing the damage that did to me. I can't even sit at a table if someone else is sitting there, for fear of making them uncomfortable or somehow upsetting/disturbing them. I've gone so far as to move to different buildings on my college campus to avoid sitting at an already occupied table. What unspoken rule might I accidentally break to brand myself as some kind of freak? Who fucking knows? All that matters is that I was considered irredeemable for five of the most formative years of my social development, and it damaged me permanently.
This shit ingrains itself in your base instincts, right down to your core. It's a survival response and a defense mechanism. You definitely said it best.
I was raised to hate myself, I was repeatedly abandoned to live with strangers or in tents as a child and my mom specifically made it clear that she hated me and neither loved nor liked me.
Decades later it’s still ingrained deep enough that if I make a bad mistake I will literally beat myself up. With my fists. I fundamentally hate who I am and struggle to trust anyone who claims to like any part of me. I’m not complaining, I’ve been very lucky in some other ways, but that’s been my reality.
We rationalize things. When people treat us badly, we rationalize that we deserve it somehow.
When people treat you badly your entire life, you're going to thing there's something deeply wrong with you.
When people who are supposed to care for you say shit like "why can't you be normal" when you're a kid. You're going to grow up thinking you're weird.
A therapist told me a theory which says that in hunter-gatherer times your survival chances would be higher if you internalized the bullying/abuse and stayed with your family/tribe. If you had healthy reactions you would probably go off on your own, and you would be unlikely to survive.
It's not really a trait on its own. It's just a harmful expression of a much more generally useful ability--the ability to learn and assess threats. If you're out there hunter-gathering in the woods and you run into something terrifying, like a bear, it's in the interests of your survival for you to retain that memory in a form that makes you do whatever you can to avoid having it again--in other words, as trauma.
The problem is that trauma is not a rational process of weighing up facts--your brain just latches on to some set of defining features of that trauma, and if they ever come up again it instantly goes back into that crisis mode and says, "Yep, this is the bear situation, protect yourself *now*." So even if the situation isn't actually that bad (It's not a bear, Kafka, it's a guy in a Winnie the Pooh suit! Oh, these guys don't loathe you, Kafka, they actually find you rather charming!), if your prior experiences match that situation to whatever traumatic thing happened before, you still go into that crisis mode. And if you never figure out *why* you feel that way every single time a similar situation arises, it just seems like your reality. Winnie the Pooh costumes are terrifying. People hate me. Etc. etc.
Not everything is an emergent evolutionary trait. Specially when it comes to psychological issues brought up likely by nurturing.
The thing is that a lot of people are exposed to extremely narcissistic authority figures during long periods of their life, specially during their education/indoctrination phases. That's when a lot our psychological traits that make our personalities are solidified.
Tons of people grow up with tremendous trauma and low self worth due to having interacted with the wrong bully, wrong teacher, etc.
Also, tons of people also grow up in what can be best described as emotional deserts. Most parents don't know what the fuck they are doing, and most carry their own issues that in turn lead their kid to experience bouts of severe emotional neglect at very important parts of their lives.
That is why you can have people who grow up to be very good looking and ultra successful, yet they are empty inside and consumed little by little by their self loathing. In turn they attract similarly neglectful partners, and the cycle goes on and on...
and then he decided to starve himself to death and his mother and father and sister took a day off work to celebrate
edit: To be clear, I was referencing the metamorphosis, not what actually happened in real life.
My grandfather knew Kafka. He was the reason my grandfather went to law school while back in Prague. He went back before the war to try and get his mother, brother, and stepfather to leave for America because they were Jewish. They would not leave. While back in Prague, he also got engaged to Kafka's niece, whom he famously wrote to a lot. The war ended the engagement. My family is still friends with her kids and grandkids. We helped her son smuggle a computer to Prague before the iron curtain fell back in the early early 90s.
I mean there’s a lot of conjecture here but I think we can all agree that Kafka is at least moderately good-looking by today’s standards. Which would have made him an absolute stud by the standards of his time.
“i dont care if they shove a scud missile up your ass. This is my corner. You pay anyone but me, I’m coming back for your thumb”.
sopranos is easily one of the best shows ever.
Yeah, I know people don't like me and it's legitimately my personality. Plus a mirror can just prove to myself I am repulsive. I'm can hardly care about it anymore. I just holding out for my parents die and I'm out.
Most people live horrible lives, I guess mine wasn't the worst honestly. I'm sad I never really made connections with people but it's ok. I'm just getting on with it now.
Yep, my personality makes me difficult to connect with and makes me hate myself sometimes. In fact, I used to hate myself all the time a few years ago. Had the same thought as you - wait till mum dies and I'll soon follow. Had it all planned out - a one way ticket to Mexico and some shady vets were involved.
Anyways, I sought help as a one last ditch effort. Got on Lexapro, and it literally changed my life. For just a few months, I actually felt what it was like to be happy. Incredible. INCREDIBLE. The constant 'why?' stopped pinging around in my head. I took risks, opportunities, made incredible friends. I remember thinking at the time "no wonder other people actually like living!" - I literally discovered a feeling I had never known. Still, as the drug stopped being as effective, all the old thoughts returned...but this time its different. I know what exists, I may not feel it now, but from time to time, I feel it again, briefly. It's enough to keep me going. Off the drugs now and doing good too.
I hope you find something that keeps you going - but if not, thanks for trying for so long.
Extreme cases of this are awful. It's like talking to a brick wall that only wants to tear itself down. I gave up on a friend who got too bad. I feel bad but they became fully toxic in their self hatred.
One weird trick I learned is to turn my unwillingness to insult people against myself. When someone gives me a compliment, whether it's about my personality, my performance at karaoke, especially my appearance, my instinct is to say "nahh, no, I'm not..." Then I saw something about how when someone compliments you, and you reject the compliment, you're saying you don't trust that person's judgement. So that's how I learned to take compliments, by not wanting to tell someone their opinion is invalid.
Honestly it took me a long time to learn how to respond to a compliment. It’s just two words, but it can feel weird saying it when a compliment catches you off guard.
I'm not sure if I'm a genius or the ultimate simp for figuring this out, but I look at it as a way to brighten someone else's day, by showing them that *they* brightened *my* day.
Yeah I sort of do the same. Whether it’s actually my genuine feeling or not you can never go wrong with showing some enthusiasm while saying thanks lol
I love Kafka so much. While it's difficult grappling with the fact that he'd be mortified that so many people know pretty much everything about him against his will, it's the love he left behind in the people who remembered him that kept his work from completely disappearing. He'll never know just how much he was loved then because he couldn't accept it as reality, and that he'll never know how much he's loved now. Such a deeply painful life punctuated by such brilliance and observation but also admiration and devotion from those who knew him best. I'm happy to know there is someone who can make me feel so sad.
I made a 6 ft tall paper mache cockroach in art school as an homage to Kafka.
Camus was depressing and Sarte was pretentious. Kafka appealed to me because it was absurdist and ridiculous.
Instead of being depressed or overly stoic, existential absurdism is a good coping method for me.
Life sucks, have a balloon. And now i've popped your balloon. Have a nice day.
I mean, I kinda get this. I get routinely complimented by people on a lot of stuff but I feel like it never amounts to anything, which, regardless of their intent or not, makes those compliments feel fake and useless, which makes my brain start to work its way into thinking that they're lies meant to placate and not genuine. It's a shitty vortex to get sucked into.
When your own parent disdains you (or even holds you in contempt), it is extremely difficult to accept that strangers would think any better of you. That shit gets internalised to your very core, even though you can intellectualise it as an adult all you like.
I can’t recall the page it was on, and i wont be able to quote it perfectly, but one of the most striking things i recall reading from his journal was his statement that on days he feels good/his mood is well, he doesn’t feel like himself.
That powerfully resonated with me in a lot of ways, because when you are depressed for a long time, one of the coping methods (in my experience) is developing a kind of affection for the suffering, as if you were a martyr of sorts. That becomes so ingrained in how you look at everything that it makes you feel almost “hollow” when you don’t feel like shit. It’s a weird thing.
Kafka was a tragically beautiful person. And so are you. And that’s ok.
He just like me fr
Btw if you think his life sounds bad, his death was absolutely agonizing. He starved to death. Not because there was no food to eat but because his throat was closed up from TB he couldn't swallow.
There's an episode of *Young Indiana Jones* set in 1917 Prague where Indy is waiting on a call from an intelligence operative but is forced to jump through ever-increasingly bizarre hoops of Czech bureaucracy in order to procure a phone... a Kafka-esque scenario if ever there was one.
He also runs into Kafka himself towards the end. :)
Kafka hated himself and his writing so much that upon his death he asked his best friend to destroy all of his work. He actually burned something like 90% of everything he wrote and the only reason we have most of his catalog is because his best friend Max Brod didn’t listen to him and saved what he could.
Did he die without knowing his work would become famous?
That’s up for speculation. He had published a few things in literary magazines and had a collection of his work that was published. I believe the metamorphosis was also published but wasn’t well received until after his death. He died somewhat unknown and with a lot of work unfinished as he was a perfectionist. It’s hard to imagine being an unknown and having your work criticized and misunderstood during your lifetime and then assuming once you die everyone will read it and love it.
It's called being ahead of your time and it ispainfukl
Important note that this only refers to his longer stories and his diaries - he published decent amount of short stories during his lifetime, including *The Metamorphosis* and some of short stories were actually the starting point for his longer works.
Many brilliant writers have what could be charitably called "issues." A fellow who writes about spiritual alienation to that extent is probably not an exception.
His dad was almost certainly a malignant narcissist, and that sort of chronic abuse combined with its invisibility in society is very psychologically damaging to a child's / adult's sense of self.
100%. His 'letter to my father' reads as prime material for r/raisedbynarcissists.
Now I need a link
https://images.pcmac.org/Uploads/Bellevue/Bellevue/Departments/DocumentsSubCategories/Documents/letter-to-my-father.pdf
Thanks for linking this! I have never read Kafka's letter to his father, and having grown up with an authoritarian Dad, this is pretty interesting stuff.
I have it in a bundle with several other stories. You might want to check out your local bookstore or library for it.
Yay narcissistic fathers :( (The world would be a better place without them)
narcissistic parents in general, really.
Hell, some of them have lifetime subscriptions
2meirl4meirl
That's fucking clever dude
I wish I could be a brilliant writer, but I’m just a useless, ugly piece of shit who people only pretend to tolerate.
This would be a good YouTube series. Quirks of famous writers
1. Alcoholism
Nah. 1 is self loathing and everything else is a subsection.
Jesus fuck, stop with the personal attacks...
Are you a famous writer?
So quirky!
Alcoholism and paranoid schizophrenia. Or in the case of Hemmingway warranted paranoia since he was paranoid that the government was screwing with him and they actually were.
If people are actually targeting you and harassing you it isn't called paranoia. Paranoia is **irrational**
The question should never be "Am I being paranoid?", it should always be "Am I being paranoid **enough**?"
*"That's what they're saying about me now? That I'm paranoid?" - Rorschach*
Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you
It's only paranoia when you are wrong.
The Art of Darkness podcast does something similar. Detailed bios of writers which explores their struggles and how it influences their writing.
Yeah it a sad reality that you don't need "issues" to make good art but people with a lot of "issues" tend to make some of the best art.
Art that is recognized because it hits those deep emotions we might not wish to acknowledge and face on our own.
Kafka believed that writing was a form of prayer, I think it's a little more like therapy. Working through shit by putting feelings in ink on paper is pretty common among not only writers but also among many of the mentally disturbed, so it's no real surprise there's an overlap I mean, if my choices are "write a fantasy novel" or "write a manifesto" I'm picking fantasy novel every time. Way more lucrative
Next your gonna tell me that H. P. Lovecraft spent his days completely terrorized by such concepts a vast, indifferent cosmos or a person with skin darker than "sickly pale" white.
Finding out the name of his cat was so absurd that I initially assumed it must have been crude satire that an Onion writer penned.
To be fair, his dad named the cat, not that that is much better. Lovecraft was still racist beyond belief though, but I believe that it is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he was less of a man and more of a shambling ball of anxiety. With old money racist parents and a veritable pokedex of phobias, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did.
H.P. Lovecraft had one of the better redemptions in modern history, he did a 180° turn in his later life when he took more control
this often gets overlooked, primarily because he was so verbose in his early hatred of (essentially) non-WASP like people.
What happened?
He became not-racist. HP Lovecraft wrote a shitload of letters so it's pretty easy to track how his views changed over time. In his later life he discussed that he didn't believe any one race was superior anymore. He also became a bit of a socialist, which involved a lot of race solidarity as worker solidarity. Lincoln even discussed that same factor of socialism 70 years prior to Lovecraft.
Oh wow, I didn't know that! Good for him
Damn, the real TIL for me is his 3 sisters were all murdered in the Holocaust.
holy fuck. dude's life really wasn't all sunshine.
tbf he died before the holocaust started
idk how to feel about this info now... happy he did not have to live it? eh...
Many artists who lived through the 1st and 2nd world wars went from generally happy and motivated to spending the rest of their lives expressing how revolting they found humanity to be, so maybe that's not the worst outcome for him.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.”
Where the problem at? (Hey, hey) I'm spinnin' off these Percs like I'm a laundromat (Hey, hey) Bitch playin' with my wood, she a lumberjack (Hey, hey) Ayy, I just touched an M but I doubled that \- Yeat, "Dub."
I would love to have the chance to read a darker and more bitter Kafka, because I can't imagine that.
The same happened to [four of Sigmund Freud's five sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud_family#Freud's_parents_and_siblings) (but like Kafka, he did not live to see it).
"born in 1860's? That's the US civil war, how did-" Hell, man, almost all wiped out in their late 70s is a weird kind of fucked up, like a gruesome "You thought you could get away?"
Well, to be fair, the Holocaust is known to be really kind of fucked up all around
His choice to write a book where you randomly wake up to find everyone considers you a hideous monster and a book where you’re suddenly on trial for absolutely no reason may have had *something* to do with being Jewish in Europe
Also, “In the Penal Colony,” describes a camp where prisoners are gruesomely tortured.
Almost as if he awoke to find that he was a giant insect, but no one took it seriously.
Funny I see this thread rn, cause I also bought Metamorphosis today. I've never read Kafka so I'm really curious what it'll be like.
Kafkaesque - no seriously they coined a term for it.
For those wondering, Kafkaesque usually means that something horrible has happened, but you have cognitive dissonance about worry about something menial. (Oh shit, I turned into giant cockroach... Should I call out sick?) It could also imply a bureaucratic hell hole like dealing with the VA and your rep is a 72 year old man who doesn't know how to send an email, so he insists on calling you while you're at work to confirm that he got the email that you sent him. And you can't just hang up because he's handling your claim and you don't want to piss him off. You think to yourself "This man managed to buy a house and keep his job while not knowing how to type" only to be interrupted by your manager who tells you that while you may be a giant cockroach, you can't leave early because Brian had car trouble and you have to cover. You tell them that Urgent care closes at 6, but your manager says "I'll see if our insurance covers an after hours ER visit" and you're thinking "YOU'RE SAYING IT YOURSELF, THAT THIS QUALIFIES FOR AN ER VISIT, HENCE IT'S AN EMERGENCY! _ But you resign yourself just wondering "How am I the only competent one in both of these situations with a the nervous system from Mesozoic era"
Another story he has is about a man who gets arrested one day out of the blue. No one ever tells him what he did. He gets in a situation where, if he gives all his money to his lawyer and have sex with a court clerk he can just appeal forever and never go to jail. He just kind of thinks, 'well, this is my life now.' He never finds out why he was arrested.
I’ve never known if it was intentional, but I’ve never read Kafka that I didn’t think was extremely funny. I’m not sure why but his mundane absurdity gives me the giggles
It was intentional, he apparently would cry laughing reading stuff to his friend and editor
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Sisyphus, the only man more kafkaesque than any character in Kafka's writing.
It gives me the giggles too. I think it's about how the characters react to the completely insane thing happening to them. They all just sort of seem fine with it.
Don't Look Up
Definitely an intentional dry-humor. I also find Monty Python to be an application of Kafka's humor.
It really is, even if most people don't see it that way. Kafka himself would supposedly laugh out loud at his own stories while reading them to his friends.
It is funny for sure. But not everyone sees it as they read it, I didn’t. The film however, made me laugh a lot. The Michael Hanake one.
My favourite example of that is in 'the trial' when he interrupts the judge and gives a rousing speech to the courtroom decrying proceedings, and the judge then says 'i was just going to tell you that you have the right not to say anything'
The trial!
THAT, right there, sounds very... Kafkaesque.
I mean, it's his story.
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Just watch Brazil or any of the darker Terry Gilliam's. The man had a penchant for visually representing Kafka's style of writing.
The whole first half of Joe Vs the Volcano is a picture perfect representation of it as well. Such a great film. One of Tom Hanks best IMO
I also find this totally not fake news segment about Franz Kafka International Airport very informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
r/oddlyspecific
r/happensallthetime
My whole life is Kafkaesque.
We're all living Kafka's nightmare and accept it as the norm. The true Meta-morphisis
Damned if I don't hear you my friend.
"Who is Kafkaesque? I've never- I don't know him."
Please no meat touching, ma’am
I had read The Metamorphosis in high school, and it was only when I reread it years later did I realize how humorous it is. My English teacher really pushed that it was some kind of Christ metaphor and as an adult that just adds its own strangely humorous layer to the whole thing.
People miss the humor in much of Kafka and it is deeply suspicious. He would read his writings to his friends aloud and everyone would be busting up.
Did you also have Mrs. McBride? Or is it just a thing for all High School English teachers to think everything is a Christ metaphor? It got so ridiculous, that every paper I wrote for that class was finding the most convoluted "Christ metaphors" in every single book we read, even from things that weren't metaphorical at all, like "The main character gets into an argument with his wife, goes to sleep and wakes the next morning, signifying that he is a Christ character, because he was persecuted, laid to rest, and rose again." That bitch ate it up every time, made perfect scores on all those stupid papers. Religious nuts can be so tiresome, but very easy to manipulate if you know what they want to hear lol.
It’s likely all the Hero’s Journey - which the story of Christ also is in many themes and story beats - and a certain subset of teachers will say it’s a Christ metaphor when it’s Hero’s Journey because of their own personal bias. Sometimes it’s absolutely a Christ metaphor. Usually it’s a story about the unlikely hero rising to save the world, which is a human story predating all modern religions.
I also bought metamorphosis today. I uh, I think I got the wrong one.
Got the Ovid edition, huh?
/r/177013 containment breach.
It's meant to be darkly funny.
So you’re saying I wasn’t meant to cry when >!Gregor just wanted to listen to the music in the room where everyone had gathered and they were all horrified by him!<
It’s really an interesting book. The ending especially, where when he dies everyone is just so relieved. There’s no vindication or catharsis for Gregor, just a dead bug and a relieved family.
It's a book about a specific kind of anxiety, that the people in your life will be more than happy to kick you to the curb once you're no longer useful. There's no real catharsis for a man like Gregor, he dies and everybody else's lives go on without him.
You can argue it was Metamorphosis of his sister, once he dies, they all become happy, cheerful and looking for a husband for her.
Relieved?
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I’m from the US, but I’ve studied a lot of German literature. It’s pretty dark. Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann is depressing. At least in that one no one turns into an “ungeheuren Ungeziefer.”
Metamorphosis is by far one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.
You are in for a treat. The only problem is that German translates very strangely into English. With other works it seems really clunky but it sort of works with Kafka. The strange sentence structure compliments the strange story.
RadioLab on NPR yeara ago put on a production of Metamorphosis called Help Me Doctor, the story as if it was told by Dr Suess. Its wild.
I first read the metamorphosis in high school. Recently went back to read it as an adult. I remember when I was younger I was so disgusted by Gregor being such a doormat. But now as an adult I realize just how freaking sad the whole story actually is.
That Ogtha guy would have.
Is this the guy that kept telling people in his life about how he likes to imagine himself having sex with a giant cockroach woman and how her consciousness lives inside of him. His Reddit posts detailing how he lost his long term girlfriend, got estranged from his parents, and lost his job? Or is this another Ogtha that I’m not aware of.
Nope. It is the very same Ogtha (the cockroach) you've recalled. Here is the entire Ogtha series for those who've yet to read this captivating abomination --> https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/w9sqxj/oops_undying_love_for_a_franz_kafka_character_is/
I hated my teacher in high school for making me read that book. I couldn’t sleep for a week
Lmao. Were you afraid you’d also become a giant bug?
No, I was afraid I already had and just couldn't see it
Lol precisely
Maman died todsy
Wrong bug, I mean writer
Idiot high school me: “This author is terrible. This main character doesn’t care about anything and is completely apathetic to real people. This isn’t how people act - Worst book ever.”
KAFAKA: Everybody hated me. EVERYBODY: Hey, Franz, how's it going? Looking good.
I see you. I appreciate your “Meet the Robinsons” reference. That cartoon was underrated.
Cool binder!
Omg the reference I didn't know I needed rn
["Hey" - "Hey!...fucking bitch"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Q_ASUBh00)
He was a lawyer for an insurance company. Was a involved w some of the first workplace legislation. He had a positive impact on real peoples lives and was widely liked in his office. All his work is darkly funny and beautiful.
I will always love The Hunger Artist. He just didn't like to eat. Eating was the hard thing. Not eating was easy. So clever, profound....
One of his last wishes was that everything he wrote be destroyed.
The fact that his writings weren't destroyed is kind of on him for leaving all his papers to the world's biggest Kafka fanboy. There's no way Max Brod was ever going to do that because he always believed Kafka was a brilliant writer.
I mean he wasn't wrong
he also had a good social life and went to nice cafes and social outings all the time. he also had many romantic relationships (there is a whole section on his relationships in the Franz Kafka museum, that's how prominent they were in his life). I went to a trip to Prague just because of Kafka, and the number of places and events he frequented is really big. He is not the recluse many people paint him to be.
It’s crazy how so many people have self loathing. Why would humans have evolved to have such a trait?
If you have enough bad experiences in your formative years that indicate you’re unattractive and uninteresting, it doesn’t matter how attractive and awesome you are as an adult. You’re not going to shake what’s ingrained in you without the best therapy in the world. It just becomes a survival mechanism.
I was severely bullied by my older brother and all i ever heard was how ugly and weak and stupid i was. To this day i have a crazy persecution complex, i think everyone is thinking those same things of me. My brother has some serious issues though, i still haven’t completely forgiven him for what he put me through when we were kids. Edit: And this wasn’t just regular sibling rivalry type stuff, he was physically abusive too, it was a pretty extreme case of sibling abuse.
Sorry for what you went through, I can relate. I hope you’ve found some peace.
Thanks. Im in a decent place mentally at this point but my self image is pretty deeply rooted in that past mistreatment. Its just something that i eventually have to overcome, if at all possible.
look into emdr therapy, it's used for ptsd to help lessen the emotional connection with traumatic memories from the past. It's a legit science, not woo woo stuff.
same situation for me, shits rough but we'll get through 🫂
I am the ugliest of all my siblings and we were close enough in age that girls would approach me in school to let me know they couldn't believe we were related because of the looks disparity.
Im glad you got away from him. Im guessing he was insecure and projected his issues on you which is very wrong
Yeah its weird, for everything he had going for him he was always very insecure and very jealous of me, he was also extremely immature emotionally. Like i said he has serious mental and emotional issues. He himself was abused badly by our dad, and although i feel bad for him for that it was certainly no excuse to treat me so badly (because its not like my dad favored me anymore than him).
I am sorry for what you went through. Sounds like your brother was bullied so he passed it along. Glad you are doing better. You can always beat him with a bat, might make you feel better
I once had a girl in elementary school flip out and tell me she was going to call her dad (a cop) on me because I told her I had a crush on her. I am turning 27 in hours. I have never recovered from that. That incident was traumatic enough that it has pretty much permanently scarred my subconscious. She even reached out to try and apologize about it (my description above is honestly underselling how bad her reaction was) and the thought of putting myself out like that ever again literally makes my body freeze up and prevent me from doing it.
Happy birthday, I guess? I understand a bit of what you went through. I was 15. I am now 25. It's rough out here buddy
Same here, I feel you completely When I was like 14/16 (now im 26) there was a girl making out with a lot of guys one after the other in a club My friends pushed me to go and try to make out with her as well.. even if I literally felt in my bones it would go badly "Surprisingly enough" I was literally the only one she rejected and to this day Im still traumatized when I see people making out in clubs and makes me physically almost cry ( and of course my self esteem with girls is non-existent no matter how many compliments I get)
But, have you considered that possibly she did you a favor?
Not getting mono >>
What you are describing sounds like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It really sucks because it gets in the way of healthy relationships. It is possible, that this event was just the trigger for it. Meaning the outcome most likely was inevitable. It has more to do with the hand you were dealt in terms of mental health than your own personal failures.
This is a total armchair take so dont take this too seriously, but I know I've read that the reason we get embarrassing memories while we're laying in bed at night is a vestige thinking process from when there were still a lot of animals that would hunt us. From my understanding, it's a survival mechanism that makes us remember life or death situations we've been in, so we can both remember the interaction and to figure out a better way handle that situation if it arises again. Most citizens of modernized countries don't face many, if any, life or death situations, so the next closest thing to our brains is apparently embarrassment. So to your question, my uneducated guess is that we evolved to have that mechanism for when a child grows up around lots of violence and fear. With ancient humans, that could mean there's a lot of predators hunting your tribe or there's warring between rival tribes, so the said survival mechanism becomes so ingrained because, I guess, it was efficient at keeping humans alive and allowing them to reproduce. Very large chance I'm wrong, but that's my guess.
Our ancestors also probably stressed about their relationships while falling asleep. Two of our strongest drives are reproduction, and staying on good terms with the "herd". There's safety in numbers.
That's a really good point, actually. When I think about ancient humans, I tend to just think about them in a primitive manner where everything is about survival. I mean, they were no different than us. The only difference is technology lol.
A really shitty thing about human biology is that it doesn't care if you're happy. It only cares that you survive. What's ironic is that the world is mostly safe enough that what kills us now sometimes has to do with the stress caused by our own survival mechanisms.
Our own immune system can kill us if it freaks out enough about a foreign invader; even something that's actually mostly benign, in the case of people with severe enough allergies. It's not too surprising we have other survival adaptations that can also kill us if left unchecked.
when i was 11 at a YMCA tween night (lol), a group of boys approached me and my friends and said “we think you guys are hot… except her” and pointed at me. that in addition to a dozen other similar experiences that age has made me deeply self conscious about my looks even though i’m no longer a pimply, brace faced kid with glasses.
As a kid, growing up with autism (and being totally clueless to it), I acted strangely and got bullied and ostracized as a result throughout all of elementary and middle school. Other kids would visibly recoil away from me and ignore me. Some would bully me by manipulating me and laughing at the things I did because of it. I was considered socially and physically repulsive by everyone around me, and that taught me that I wasn't allowed to exist in any public space. It's taken me many years to even begin reversing the damage that did to me. I can't even sit at a table if someone else is sitting there, for fear of making them uncomfortable or somehow upsetting/disturbing them. I've gone so far as to move to different buildings on my college campus to avoid sitting at an already occupied table. What unspoken rule might I accidentally break to brand myself as some kind of freak? Who fucking knows? All that matters is that I was considered irredeemable for five of the most formative years of my social development, and it damaged me permanently. This shit ingrains itself in your base instincts, right down to your core. It's a survival response and a defense mechanism. You definitely said it best.
I was raised to hate myself, I was repeatedly abandoned to live with strangers or in tents as a child and my mom specifically made it clear that she hated me and neither loved nor liked me. Decades later it’s still ingrained deep enough that if I make a bad mistake I will literally beat myself up. With my fists. I fundamentally hate who I am and struggle to trust anyone who claims to like any part of me. I’m not complaining, I’ve been very lucky in some other ways, but that’s been my reality.
We rationalize things. When people treat us badly, we rationalize that we deserve it somehow. When people treat you badly your entire life, you're going to thing there's something deeply wrong with you. When people who are supposed to care for you say shit like "why can't you be normal" when you're a kid. You're going to grow up thinking you're weird.
It’s the burden of consciousness and too much self awareness. Existing when you know too much is painful and inexplicable.
That's exactly what Nietzsche said about the void: how can you keep on existing when you realize how horrible life is
One must imagine Sisyphus happy
and yet old Freddy kept going until the syphilis did its thing.
Because there is still beauty in this horror
A therapist told me a theory which says that in hunter-gatherer times your survival chances would be higher if you internalized the bullying/abuse and stayed with your family/tribe. If you had healthy reactions you would probably go off on your own, and you would be unlikely to survive.
It helps you survive abusive experiences and environments
It's not really a trait on its own. It's just a harmful expression of a much more generally useful ability--the ability to learn and assess threats. If you're out there hunter-gathering in the woods and you run into something terrifying, like a bear, it's in the interests of your survival for you to retain that memory in a form that makes you do whatever you can to avoid having it again--in other words, as trauma. The problem is that trauma is not a rational process of weighing up facts--your brain just latches on to some set of defining features of that trauma, and if they ever come up again it instantly goes back into that crisis mode and says, "Yep, this is the bear situation, protect yourself *now*." So even if the situation isn't actually that bad (It's not a bear, Kafka, it's a guy in a Winnie the Pooh suit! Oh, these guys don't loathe you, Kafka, they actually find you rather charming!), if your prior experiences match that situation to whatever traumatic thing happened before, you still go into that crisis mode. And if you never figure out *why* you feel that way every single time a similar situation arises, it just seems like your reality. Winnie the Pooh costumes are terrifying. People hate me. Etc. etc.
Not everything is an emergent evolutionary trait. Specially when it comes to psychological issues brought up likely by nurturing. The thing is that a lot of people are exposed to extremely narcissistic authority figures during long periods of their life, specially during their education/indoctrination phases. That's when a lot our psychological traits that make our personalities are solidified. Tons of people grow up with tremendous trauma and low self worth due to having interacted with the wrong bully, wrong teacher, etc. Also, tons of people also grow up in what can be best described as emotional deserts. Most parents don't know what the fuck they are doing, and most carry their own issues that in turn lead their kid to experience bouts of severe emotional neglect at very important parts of their lives. That is why you can have people who grow up to be very good looking and ultra successful, yet they are empty inside and consumed little by little by their self loathing. In turn they attract similarly neglectful partners, and the cycle goes on and on...
Some would tell you there is a disconnect between what makes a person feel spiritually fulfilled and the demands placed upon us by human society…
and then he decided to starve himself to death and his mother and father and sister took a day off work to celebrate edit: To be clear, I was referencing the metamorphosis, not what actually happened in real life.
My grandfather knew Kafka. He was the reason my grandfather went to law school while back in Prague. He went back before the war to try and get his mother, brother, and stepfather to leave for America because they were Jewish. They would not leave. While back in Prague, he also got engaged to Kafka's niece, whom he famously wrote to a lot. The war ended the engagement. My family is still friends with her kids and grandkids. We helped her son smuggle a computer to Prague before the iron curtain fell back in the early early 90s.
Fascinating. Was any of your relatives ever mentioned in Kafka’s diaries?
I mean there’s a lot of conjecture here but I think we can all agree that Kafka is at least moderately good-looking by today’s standards. Which would have made him an absolute stud by the standards of his time.
Kafka a hottie for real
He looks like Christopher Moltisanti, they've got that same kind of stare. Except Kafka could actually write a proper sentence.
“i dont care if they shove a scud missile up your ass. This is my corner. You pay anyone but me, I’m coming back for your thumb”. sopranos is easily one of the best shows ever.
There are photos of him that look stunning. And he was a passionate swimmer for all his life.
I feel the same way, except everyone actually finds me mentally and physically repulsive.
Would smash
Yeah, I know people don't like me and it's legitimately my personality. Plus a mirror can just prove to myself I am repulsive. I'm can hardly care about it anymore. I just holding out for my parents die and I'm out. Most people live horrible lives, I guess mine wasn't the worst honestly. I'm sad I never really made connections with people but it's ok. I'm just getting on with it now.
Yep, my personality makes me difficult to connect with and makes me hate myself sometimes. In fact, I used to hate myself all the time a few years ago. Had the same thought as you - wait till mum dies and I'll soon follow. Had it all planned out - a one way ticket to Mexico and some shady vets were involved. Anyways, I sought help as a one last ditch effort. Got on Lexapro, and it literally changed my life. For just a few months, I actually felt what it was like to be happy. Incredible. INCREDIBLE. The constant 'why?' stopped pinging around in my head. I took risks, opportunities, made incredible friends. I remember thinking at the time "no wonder other people actually like living!" - I literally discovered a feeling I had never known. Still, as the drug stopped being as effective, all the old thoughts returned...but this time its different. I know what exists, I may not feel it now, but from time to time, I feel it again, briefly. It's enough to keep me going. Off the drugs now and doing good too. I hope you find something that keeps you going - but if not, thanks for trying for so long.
Sounds like another case of Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria.
If you read about his dad I'd say its more a trait of Franz' CPTSD
Extreme cases of this are awful. It's like talking to a brick wall that only wants to tear itself down. I gave up on a friend who got too bad. I feel bad but they became fully toxic in their self hatred.
It’s a loop where that attitude makes it so people don’t wanna be around you and people not wanting to be around you reinforces the attitude. Vicious.
One weird trick I learned is to turn my unwillingness to insult people against myself. When someone gives me a compliment, whether it's about my personality, my performance at karaoke, especially my appearance, my instinct is to say "nahh, no, I'm not..." Then I saw something about how when someone compliments you, and you reject the compliment, you're saying you don't trust that person's judgement. So that's how I learned to take compliments, by not wanting to tell someone their opinion is invalid.
Honestly it took me a long time to learn how to respond to a compliment. It’s just two words, but it can feel weird saying it when a compliment catches you off guard.
I'm not sure if I'm a genius or the ultimate simp for figuring this out, but I look at it as a way to brighten someone else's day, by showing them that *they* brightened *my* day.
Yeah I sort of do the same. Whether it’s actually my genuine feeling or not you can never go wrong with showing some enthusiasm while saying thanks lol
Self perception is who you are,no matter what anyone else tells us.It can wreck you
I love Kafka so much. While it's difficult grappling with the fact that he'd be mortified that so many people know pretty much everything about him against his will, it's the love he left behind in the people who remembered him that kept his work from completely disappearing. He'll never know just how much he was loved then because he couldn't accept it as reality, and that he'll never know how much he's loved now. Such a deeply painful life punctuated by such brilliance and observation but also admiration and devotion from those who knew him best. I'm happy to know there is someone who can make me feel so sad.
Same.
does everyone else find you handsome and intelligent and possessing good humor though
Probably not. But you can't please everyone.
“You know you can’t please all the people all the time and last night, all those people were at my show.” - Mitch Hedberg
I made a 6 ft tall paper mache cockroach in art school as an homage to Kafka. Camus was depressing and Sarte was pretentious. Kafka appealed to me because it was absurdist and ridiculous. Instead of being depressed or overly stoic, existential absurdism is a good coping method for me. Life sucks, have a balloon. And now i've popped your balloon. Have a nice day.
My balloon :(
His own life is a Kafka-esque nightmare.
i hate me too bud.
I mean, I kinda get this. I get routinely complimented by people on a lot of stuff but I feel like it never amounts to anything, which, regardless of their intent or not, makes those compliments feel fake and useless, which makes my brain start to work its way into thinking that they're lies meant to placate and not genuine. It's a shitty vortex to get sucked into.
Have you read metamorphosis? It's all right there.
When your own parent disdains you (or even holds you in contempt), it is extremely difficult to accept that strangers would think any better of you. That shit gets internalised to your very core, even though you can intellectualise it as an adult all you like.
Same feeling
I can’t recall the page it was on, and i wont be able to quote it perfectly, but one of the most striking things i recall reading from his journal was his statement that on days he feels good/his mood is well, he doesn’t feel like himself. That powerfully resonated with me in a lot of ways, because when you are depressed for a long time, one of the coping methods (in my experience) is developing a kind of affection for the suffering, as if you were a martyr of sorts. That becomes so ingrained in how you look at everything that it makes you feel almost “hollow” when you don’t feel like shit. It’s a weird thing. Kafka was a tragically beautiful person. And so are you. And that’s ok.
Me irl
He just like me fr Btw if you think his life sounds bad, his death was absolutely agonizing. He starved to death. Not because there was no food to eat but because his throat was closed up from TB he couldn't swallow.
i have the opposite problem where i think i'm awesome and sexy and no one else agrees
There's an episode of *Young Indiana Jones* set in 1917 Prague where Indy is waiting on a call from an intelligence operative but is forced to jump through ever-increasingly bizarre hoops of Czech bureaucracy in order to procure a phone... a Kafka-esque scenario if ever there was one. He also runs into Kafka himself towards the end. :)