Kafka's Genius Philosophy
I am free and that's why I am lost.
Hi everyone, in this video I'll talk about one of the most influential fiction writers
of the 20th century.
Franz Kafka's name alone has become a literary style called Kafkaesque.
He wrote about human nightmares, a state of paralysis when your legs and arms fail you.
Kafka's is a story of failure, a beautiful failure.
Before I start I have a confession, I always thought Kafka was a complainer, constantly
whining how terrible the world is without offering any solutions.
A prophet of doom.
But then I read all his novels and short stories, how wrong I was about Kafka.
In this video I'll do three things.
First I'll look at Kafka's life, then summarize and discuss six of his most famous stories
and finally ten lessons we can learn from him.
I have looked at all his novels and short stories and his life and come up with ten
simple lessons we can learn from Kafka.
Whether you are a writer, artist or reader, Kafka has a lot to offer.
His story is a story of failure, a beautiful failure.
So sit back with a cup of coffee and enjoy the video on how to fail and beautifully.
Franz Kafka was born in 1882 in Prague into a German-speaking Jewish family.
German at the time was seen as a more instrumental language for social mobility.
Kafka also spoke Czech but not fluently.
Prague was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time.
But towards the end of Kafka's life, the empire collapsed in 1918 and the nation of Czech
Slovakia was born.
These two split into two countries in 1993 as Czech and Slovakia.
So he is generally considered a Czech author despite writing in German.
Kafka's middle-class background allowed him to get a good education and a university law
degree and later worked at an insurance company.
He found his job a huge hindrance to his writing as he stayed at the office for long hours.
Despite this, he managed to write in his free time mainly in the evenings or at night.
In fact, it was his writing, a moment of freedom that allowed him to cope with his stressful
job and life.
He kept a diary throughout this period.
He worked for 15 years and finally retired with a pension at the age of 35.
But unfortunately his health deteriorated soon after and he died two years later in
1924 after contracting tuberculosis.
Despite a somewhat short life, he left quite a good body of work behind.
Now we have three novels and a great many short stories.
He published very few of his writing during his lifetime.
He left his writing with his friend Max Brod and told him to burn them but Brod went against
Kafka and published them after his death.
Even his attempt to burn his stories failed.
Kafka was twice engaged to a woman.
On both occasions, I was called off due to his health.
His limitless sex drive forced him to visit prostitutes.
He did supposedly father one child but we can't be certain.
He was pessimistic about his relationships.
In one of his letters to his lover, he talks of being bound to her by hand like those French
couples bound together who were led to scaffold during the French Revolution.
Even in that intense moment of romantic expression, he cannot think but a doomed end.
Instead of altar, he thinks of scaffold.
His pessimism came true.
They never got married.
In all his novels, there is only one example of his main character fathering a child, which
he runs away from by the way.
All his other protagonists have no children.
This theme of fatherhood is very important in his writing.
Now Kafka had a very tough relationship with his own father.
It is no secret that he didn't like his father.
In a letter to his father in 1919, Kafka wrote,
My writing was all about you.
In all his writing, the main characters fight an illogical, oppressive authority figure.
So we can assume that Kafka's writing was his way of expressing his distaste for the
way his father had treated him.
Kafka remained a timid person and incredibly critical of his own writing.
He also had three sisters who outlived him but they all sadly ended up in Nazi concentration
camps in 1940s and died there.
Kafka wasn't religious in his outlook but later in life he did try to reconnect with
his Jewish heritage.
The term Kafkaesque in English is used to describe a style of writing that is dark,
gloomy, stifling and often about a powerless individual oppressed by a powerful authority figure.
Almost a nightmarish feeling of paralysis that is common in all his stories.
Kafka made sure to name all his characters or most of them with the letter K in their names.
When you read him, keep your eyes open for names beginning with K or just K.
In other words, Kafka, if you write fiction literally with your own name or the first
letter of your name, one day you will have a style of writing named after you like Kafka.
Kafka was influenced by existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.
You can see those influences in his writing.
For example, Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God is dead.
In the absence of God, the whole idea of truth is questioned.
If you think about it, it created a massive shift in intellectual thoughts because religion
and God were no longer the existential anchor.
Now you have to find meaning somewhere else.
Kafka's protagonists struggled to find the truth.
Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer talked about how suffering is an inherent part of human condition.
All Kafka's main characters suffer a great deal and none except one escape their miserable life.
His literary influences were Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Later I'll discuss the similarities between his writing and these authors.
Dostoevsky's novel The Double seems to have inspired Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
It's also important to note that Kafka was born only one year after Dostoevsky died in 1882.
Kafka has influenced many novelists and artists.
The one author whom I've spoken before on this channel is Kazuo Ishiguro who often writes
about bizarre incidents that appear like dream or nightmare more than reality.
In his novel The Unconsoled or When We Were Orphan and even in Never Let Me Go, we can
feel Kafka talking to us.
Another author is Murakami who even titled one of his novels Kafka on the Shore after
him in which the main protagonist escapes his oppressive father.
Kafka's influence on literature is so immense that it will take hours to list them all here.
Kafka wrote three novels and many short stories.
Here I'll summarize and discuss his three novels and three short stories.
America or The Man Who Disappeared is an incomplete novel published posthumously in 1927 but it
was written in 1912 so considered Kafka's first novel.
It is the story of Karl, a 16-year-old naive but good-hearted European who is forced to
flee to America after getting an older servant pregnant.
In America, he makes a few friends, some good but most of them exploit him or get him into
trouble with those in position of power.
At first he stays at his uncle's house where life couldn't be better.
His future looks very promising but then suddenly thrown out for visiting his friend without
permission.
Later, Karl manages to get a job but dismissed for breaking the rules.
At the end he gets a job at a theater but we don't know what happens to him.
At least we know that by the end he is still alive and things are looking up.
It is Kafka's only story that ends in happiness of sort.
As I mentioned in my video on Italo Calvino, America was his favorite novel of all time.
As a first novel, we can see that Kafka was still optimistic about the world.
There is a hint of Dickens in this novel.
Karl's uncle happens to be in America and randomly meets him.
Kafka himself confesses that his inspiration for America came from Charles Dickens.
His story does appear like a young man going to America to make a life for himself and
pursuing the American dream, just like in Dickens' novels Great Expectations or David
Copperfield.
Karl is not a very strong character as there are bigger forces or tides in which he drifts
around.
This novel is less Kafkaesque.
America is the only attempt Kafka made to escape.
America is the land of freedom.
After this novel, Kafka gave up any hope of freedom.
Now we enter into Kafka's nightmare world.
We need a candle.
It's really dark.
The Trial was published in 1925 but it was written in 1914 or thereabout.
If America was inspired by Charles Dickens, The Trial was clearly a novel in the mold
of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
I should also point out that this novel is also incomplete.
What is the story?
Joseph Kay, a simple banker is arrested for a crime he doesn't know he has committed
and by people who never identify themselves.
If that's not weird enough, he is not even sent to prison.
So he is free while trying to work his case.
Justice is twisted here.
It's his job to prove himself innocent, not the authorities to prove him guilty.
He gets a lawyer who happens to make things much more difficult for him and almost becomes
like a slave master the way he controls his clients.
He then approaches other people to help him but nobody is able to.
Finally, on his 35th birthday, Joseph is arrested again by two men and executed outside the
city without he ever finding out what his crime was.
Joseph Kay feels he deserved the punishment despite not knowing what his crime is.
Dostoevsky at least told us about Raskolnikov's crime and the detectives who worked the case.
Kafka turns things upside down and takes us into a complete nightmare where we don't
know what's going on.
We follow Joseph Kay as he struggles to find out his case.
At some point, I had the feeling that he wasn't arrested at all, instead he was following
the police and claiming that he was, perhaps seeking attention.
Joseph moves through space like almost in a dream, suspended, always in limbo, as if
life itself is a sentence.
I think Kafka is telling us that life itself is a trial.
We have to prove our worth in society.
We are only treated well if we can prove that we are innocent, useful and keeping our
heads low and working hard.
If not, you are discarded by the system in the same way ants and bees discard useless
members in their colony.
Bureaucracy has replaced human discretion and has become a labyrinth or a maze to discipline,
normalize and control individuals.
In big cities, you cannot deal with people on a face to face basis.
Good luck picking a phone and calling a customer service of any big company.
They have set up a system that treats everyone the same, therefore rigid rules can appear
arbitrary and cruel to an individual.
But it makes sure the city runs smoothly, so the plight of the single individual is
not its concern.
Just like in an ant colony, individual ants are worthless.
Nations are a close mimic of an ant colony.
Individuals are sacrificed for the good of the system, authority, colony and country.
Dostoevsky put the blame on the individual to take responsibility for their crimes and
Kafka puts the blame on the system for inventing crimes to punish individuals.
Modern world and its intricate bureaucracy and specialization has stripped the individuals
of any power to influence things.
The nightmare continues in Kafka's other novel, The Castle.
The Castle was written in 1922 when Kafka was in a hotel recovering from TB, so the
remote location of the setting perhaps alludes to the hotel location.
The Castle is also incomplete and published in 1926.
By now you might have guessed that Kafka actually didn't complete any of his novels.
Unlike his other novels which he gave up finishing, Kafka failed to finish The Castle because
he died at the hotel.
The Castle is about a land surveyor who thinks he has been invited by someone in the castle
to do a job, but upon arrival he is told that the request was a mistake.
But he lingers around in the village trying to find the person who requested his service.
It's a futile effort of a man who moves into a village and wants to be recognized by authorities.
It is a closed village, especially to those coming from town.
Just like in the trial, here too the protagonist desperately tries to live in the village legally
but unable to find ways to achieve it.
Here the court system is replaced with a village and a castle, perhaps alluding to a more older
time when empires and kings ruled places.
In the trial, the court system alludes to modern world where authority has become faceless.
In The Castle too, King never manages to meet the authorities, the people in charge.
Unlike in the trial, where we don't know the location, we get to know the remote rural
location of the castle in the winter.
The village seems like a typical village.
It has two hotels, a five-star called Castle Inn and a cheap hotel called Bridge Inn.
Here the idea of community and sense of belonging is very central and the main motivation for
K as he tries to avoid the solitude that is depicted in the trial.
K tries many different ways to go to the castle or contact it or understand it or enter it
but always fails.
There are millions of obstacles.
It is like an outsider in a circle and nobody wants to include you.
The castle is like an old language that K is trying to decipher.
The title in German also means lock.
It's perhaps human attempt to get to the truth, implying that it's impossible to find the truth.
Religious or scientific truth.
Human society is like a tangled web of bureaucracy and legal system that makes the individual
powerless and defeated.
Kobo Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes is very similar.
A man accidentally arrives at a village and gets tangled in a web of sand that he never
manages to get out, like an ant stuck in something.
Now I will look at three of his most famous short stories.
The Metamorphosis was written in 1912, published in 1915, is the first on the list that was
completed by Franz Kafka.
But years after his publication he said he didn't like the ending and wished he could
change it.
In the Metamorphosis, just like in the Ovid's Metamorphoses of the Roman period, a human
turns into an animal.
In Kafka's story, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up to find himself turned
into an insect or vermin, something repulsive.
Initially he hopes that this is a temporary state, but as days pass he slowly realizes
that this is no nightmare, it's real, that he is no longer human.
Unable to leave his room, he reflects on his job and those around him, and his desperate
situation as the sole breadwinner of the family.
His absence at work alerts his boss who sends someone to visit him.
His family and colleagues fail to communicate with him.
His father tries to keep him inside the room and the process injures him twice.
Only his sister, Greta, brings food for him.
Then one day their tenants notice him and they are repulsed.
They decide to leave the house without paying rent.
Now their financial situation is dire.
Gregor's sister, his only close ally, has had enough and tells his father to get rid
of it.
This realization that he's no longer wanted in the house, Gregor starves himself to death.
The family takes a vacation to refresh themselves and plan Greta's wedding.
There's a million interpretations of this story.
Some say it's religious, some say it's feminist, some say it's a father complex.
Novikov suggested it was the struggle of an artist living in a crappy world.
Some say it's not about Gregor at all, it's all about his sister, Greta.
I personally think a lot of those interpretations seem a bit far-fetched.
Just in the Ovid's Metamorphoses, there is a lot of melodrama here.
Ovid depicted men as active and women as passive.
Kafka turns it upside down and shows how miserable a man who is passive and without a job.
Gregor's only function in the family was to provide for them.
Without bringing in any food, he's not only useless but also a parasite.
Without fulfilling his role as a provider, you might as well be dead.
You can see that Kafka was twice engaged to the same woman and each time he was called
off because Kafka was deemed too sickly to be marriage material or a good provider.
Kafka was a provider for his own family, however his future in-laws dismissed him as too sickly
to fulfill his masculine role in society.
So Gregor Samsa in the Metamorphoses is the only man deemed useless in society.
I think Kafka tells us that your value to society or to some extent your family is only
as long as you're a provider, useful and productive member.
Once you're no longer able to do that, you have no worth.
The Hunger Artist was written in 1922.
It's about an artist who impresses people with his ability to fast for days.
It's like David Blaine, the magician who went without food for 44 days.
After a while people get bored and watch some animals perform in circus.
The Hunger Artist is ignored by everyone and someone accidentally finds him in a box on
the verge of death.
He tells people that he shouldn't be admired.
Why?
His ability to fast was due to him unable to find the food that he liked.
The story ends with him dying after 40 days of fasting and replaced by a panther with
insatiable appetite for food.
Kafka himself died soon after writing The Hunger Artist.
Throughout history, artistic trends come and go.
Great artists often die unrecognized.
He survived for days when people were watching him.
Artists need an audience to motivate them, sustain them.
This is an innate human desire to be admired by others.
This mirrors Kafka's own life.
During his lifetime, he didn't get the recognition and respect we have for him today.
Bucket Writer.
It was written in 1917 but published in 1921.
The story is about a man so poor that he can fly.
On a cold winter day, he sets off to get some coal from the coal dealer but he has no money
to pay.
When he arrives at the shop, the coal dealers, the husband and wife, don't notice him.
The poor man shouts but they cannot even hear his voice.
He is so poor that he has become invisible, weightless and inaudible.
At the end, he flies away towards the ice mountain and disappears.
Poverty means you have nothing, no voice, no weight and invisible.
As we can see in all his stories, Kafka is concerned with the powerless individual against
society, usually the authority, the powerful, the mighty.
Individuals are usually unjustly and unfairly tossed around like a football.
Another theme that runs through his writings is someone arguing his case against somebody.
This is partly because of his own experience with his father, who Kafka could never impress,
and partly because as a lawyer, he always dealt with people pleading their cases.
His novels and stories are quite short in comparison to other authors of the same period,
like Robert Musial, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, all of whom I have discussed in this
channel.
That's because he had a full-time job, unlike those other authors who were perhaps more
privileged.
Despite their short length, they are not easy to read sometimes.
They need your full attention like most modernist novels.
You can't be passive.
If you want to start with something easy, read America and then read his other novels.
Now, what can we learn from Kafka?
If you read all his books, you get a distinct feeling that he is a prophet of doom and gloom.
After all, none of his protagonists win anything.
But rest assured, on the surface, Kafka may appear quite pessimistic.
He has a few great lessons in his sleeves that can help us even today.
Whether you are a writer, artist or even a reader, Kafka provides some amazing lessons
for you.
In all Kafka's works, failure is the most dominant theme.
The only exception is America, where the protagonist doesn't die by the end.
If one has to characterize Kafka's works, it would be this.
He was a beautiful artist of mourning and grief.
His stories are cries and sobs of human condition.
He was a beautiful cry artist who sobbed at every failure.
Who told stories of failure.
Perhaps he was the best artist of reality.
Failure despite being seen as negative, it's not always bad.
In fact, our evolution is only possible when our genes make mistakes.
Through mutation, we die, but we also survive.
So every failure has either the seeds for future success or if not, it can be a moment
of beauty.
In the same way, tragedies can be beautifully told and enjoyed.
In fact, if one has to characterize Kafka's own life, on the surface, it's a failure.
He didn't get married despite several attempts.
He was never happy about his work and never finished any of his novels.
He wasn't famous or financially successful during his lifetime.
But there's beauty in those failures.
Because to win, one has to give his own life.
Kafka did.
His failure and his personal life gave inspirations to millions of people who found their stifled
voices in his writing.
So there's beauty to be found in failure.
Lesson 2.
Life is a series of interruptions.
Evil is whatever distracts.
We have dreams, we wait for the right moment, we think the condition is right to start our
project, we think one day we can start doing something.
Kafka had the same feelings.
He had a desk job at an insurance company and worked long hours.
Kafka writes in his diaries,
Since I'm nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never
take position of me.
It may however shatter me completely and this is by no means a remote possibility.
His day job was a hindrance because he was never free enough to dedicate more time on
his writing.
He didn't finish any of his novels.
He even hated the ending of the metamorphosis.
He says he could have written it much better if he wasn't because of his business trips.
He was constantly interrupted.
But he also had the habit of just leaving his novels unfinished.
Like a promiscuous person going through many relationships and breakups.
If you have not finished any of Kafka's novels, don't feel bad because he never completed
them in the first place.
So the lesson here is to ride through life's endless interruptions and find moments you
can sail.
Use the little moment you get to ride your next short story.
Don't wait for a perfect condition because there is never a perfect time to do anything.
Lesson 3.
Life is absurd.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
If there's one thing that ties all Kafka's writing is the absurdities of modern life.
There are so many moments in the stories of his characters getting lost in the illogical
and irrational maze of legal system or some other entanglements.
You get the feeling that nothing makes sense.
That's precisely the point.
We may think life has a purpose.
We may think we are going somewhere.
We may think that things we do have meaning.
But if you stand back and assess things more clearly, you may find that not everything
makes sense.
Not everything has meaning.
Not everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes good things or bad things just happen.
Kafka depicts these moments of life so beautifully and so brutally.
One can see that in Kafka's writing, life is for the most part absurd, irrational and
has no inherent meaning.
All we can do is just accept its meaninglessness and absurdities.
Just the mere acceptance of it may liberate us from our own insistence on giving everything
a meaning.
Absurdities of life are normal human condition.
Accepting this fact may give us a breathing space to enjoy it more and to be good to others.
Lesson 4.
We're all alone.
One of the most heartbreaking story of Kafka is the metamorphosis and how lonely is Gregor
once he is transformed into an animal.
His family slowly gets tired of him and wants him dead.
Their compassion can only go so far.
When they see him not useful in the house as he no longer brings food on the table,
he also causes their tenant to flee the house.
Their compassion slowly turns to disgust.
Gregor spent his adult life providing for his family.
That was his role.
The lesson here is that ultimately we are alone.
Understand it and don't feel sorry for yourself when others abandon you.
In fact, lower your expectations of anything you do.
And understand that you won't be rewarded for all your deeds.
In all Kafka's stories, lonely protagonists battling to be accepted by a group, community
or authority and they fail.
Life is a lonesome journey so be useful to others but don't expect too much.
No matter how hard you worked or how much you sacrificed your life for others, don't
always expect to be rewarded.
As an individual can be fragile like a dandelion seed at the mercy of wind, we should understand
that loneliness is constant and belonging is temporary.
Kafka's friend Max Brod tells us that they would laugh aloud when reading beginning of
the trial when Joseph K is arrested for god knows what crime.
Both the metamorphosis and the trial can be read as dark comedies.
In The Castle 2, some of the events are so illogical and comically stupid that you can't
help but laugh.
In the face of utter failure, all we can do is laugh.
Life is full of ironies.
There are some big ironies about modern life for example.
Food is supposed to keep us alive but in some rich countries, there is so much food that
it has become a major killer through obesity related illnesses.
Modernity had promised everyone more free time but people in affluent countries are
the busiest of all.
The justice system was supposed to protect the weak but it has become like a spider web
that only catches the weak while the strong can tear through.
Gregor Samsa spent his entire life providing for his family and they were the first who
wanted him dead.
Kafka tells us that in the face of life's terrible ironies, we might as well laugh at it.
If you have kids, don't put too much pressure on them like Kafka's father did to Kafka.
If you pester your kids too much and give them a hard time, you might produce another Kafka.
Now that is a Kafkaesque irony.
Lesson 6.
You can't know everything.
Western civilization or modernity is predicated on the idea that through science we can know
everything.
In other words, there is an absolute truth that we can discover.
This pursuit is at the heart of Kafka's stories.
In the trial, Joseph K desperately tries to find his crime but fails.
In the castle, K puts a lot of effort to find the man who requested his service but
fails.
In a way, Kafka tells us that knowledge is never absolute, it's always relative.
Even our language is just an approximation.
Kafka says, quote,
All language is but a poor translation.
The same can be said about art.
No language, science or art can capture reality as it is.
No language is able to express the real feelings of an individual.
Nowadays we can say that not only knowing everything is not possible, but it may not
even be desirable.
We live in a world where we are sometimes overwhelmed by too much information and knowledge
that we shut ourselves to have a moment of respite.
Kafka shows that no matter how much you try, you cannot know everything.
Quote,
I cannot make you understand.
I cannot make anyone understand what's happening inside me.
I cannot even explain it to myself.
Lesson 7.
Human being is not sacred.
In the Metamorphosis, Kafka shows us that human life is pretty ordinary.
He challenges us to question the traditional notion of human created by God or a special
creature of God.
Gregor Samsa turns into a disgusting insect or a vermin.
This is more in keeping in how evolution sees humans as just another species among millions
of other species.
In fact, sometimes the insect is translated as cockroach.
In evolutionary history, cockroaches are the most successful animals.
They have existed for 250 million years, which predates the dinosaurs, and they are
still going strongly.
It's only us humans who see ourselves as somewhat special or even sacred.
Kafka questions such myth.
Our culture has given us this sacred notion of human life.
These egocentric views most likely imposed on us or taught to us by society, but in reality
we are bound by our own body that nature has provided us.
Gregor Samsa has a human mind, but an animal body.
That's what we are.
We are not special or divine, so let's not treat ourselves as such.
And we are perfectly fine to be ordinary, because there is so much beauty in the ordinary.
One of the most interesting thing about Kafka's heroes is that despite the odds being stuck
against them, they never give up.
As readers, we see that they have no chance in such brutal circumstances, but none of
them give up.
They continue their struggles to the very end.
In Hunger Artists, the artist starves himself to death.
In The Metamorphosis, Gregor too starves himself to death.
Both refuse to eat, which shows their determination and doggedness.
In The Trial and The Castle, the protagonists never stop their pursuit until they are killed.
The authorities or the regimes or the powerful tire them down, wear them down, create millions
of obstacles.
Bureaucracy is like a maze.
In the past, kings used to discipline people with brute force through physical torture.
But in modern world, authorities and companies have created walls around them, which we call
bureaucracy or institutions as obstacles.
Bureaucracy seems almost inevitable in modern world.
We see governments and companies have set up call centers or computerized systems that
sometimes it feels that you are treated like zoo animals, all fenced up in a small maze
and labyrinth.
Kafka shows us that if our notion of human being is a myth, an illusion, so is the power
once we penetrate it.
In other words, nothing lasts forever.
Despite his pessimism, Kafka wasn't a defeatist.
Defeatists don't write or tell stories.
They do nothing.
Kafka wrote about it consistently, until his very last breath.
So don't give up the fight for the individual.
Authorities and companies have their resources, but individuals have their wit and dogged persistence.
Lesson 9 Alienation is Universal
One of the most prevalent themes of Kafka's writing is alienation.
Individuals are alienated from their families, communities and even from themselves.
His characters are distancing themselves from others or sometimes forced to isolation.
Alienation is not a modern invention, but modernity made it universal.
Even powerful people are alienated.
In recent months, we heard about the British royal family and how individuals felt excluded
and alienated.
In pre-modern world, most humans were attached to a piece of land, either through ownership
or through slavery or through peasantry.
In today's world, most of us don't have any attachment to land or farming.
Most of us don't know where our food is coming from.
We don't really care, I mean most of us.
What modernity did to us to turn us into product, we have become like commodities.
In our information is used as product and sold by social media companies.
We track our own very movement every day and pass that information to these giant media
companies to use it to sell us products or sometimes use to manipulate us in some way.
Modern life to some extent resembles a zoo.
Safer, relatively more comfortable, but at the same time there are rules and boundaries.
Kafka was one of the first writers to make alienation central his writing.
Despite all his pessimism, doom and gloom in Kafka's writing, he didn't resign.
Instead he used every free hour of his time to write and tell stories.
He dedicated his life to the art of storytelling.
One of the most haunting aspects of Kafka is his powerful voice.
So having a voice is one of the best thing you can have.
It's in a way a debt to your community, society to tell your stories and those around you.
Kafka spent years perfecting his craft and he was never happy about it.
The reason none of his novels were given any proper ending was because Kafka was still
honing his craft.
He was diligent, he wanted more precision in his writing.
On the one hand Kafka dedicated his life to literature and storytelling, but on the other
hand he found writing and storytelling as his savior from the monotony of life and work.
It was his craft but also his escape.
It was his goal but also his hobby.
He was artistic but also found the art itself his cure, his healing.
So Kafka teaches us that despite the fact that life has no inherent meaning, is full
of failures, obstacles, all you can do is tell stories.
Tell great stories, tell your stories, tell stories and if you fail, fail beautifully.
In the very act of telling your stories.
