In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell.
Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.
How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity?
El amor es el deseo de encontrar a la mitad perdida de nosotros mismos.
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
The young can’t help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models – those that are in fashion, that suit, that please – and enact them.
A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.
And that was exactly her gamble: that they’d accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she’s proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it’ll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won’t stay.
What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias – constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal.
Here he was, doing things he didn’t care a damn about, and enjoying it.
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced that they had discovered the road to paradise.
No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we’d rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn’t know how to deal with women.
And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their meaning lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.
He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef’s name?
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot – he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza’s dream was something he could not endure.
Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself.
And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict tat could occur between two Russians was a lovers’ misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each others’ arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.
To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.
The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.
All he knew about old age was that it a time when a person had passed his maturity; when fate had ended; when there was no longer any need to fear that terrible mystery called the future; when every love than came along was certain and final.