Kafka and the Saints

I like Kafka. His treatment of the world is that of reductio ad absurdum. I find a lot of people, with a sort of evangelical framework, can’t understand my feeling at home in such things. Kafka gives us the world in its injustice, but reduces it to its utter mindlessness, its senility, its deprivation of meaning. In that sense, he writes like the Saints. Where is the splendor of the world? Is it the Castle? Where is the justice of the world? Is it the Trial? Where is the meaning? In its industry, that metamorphoses a man into a creature at once of hive and of utter alienation from himself? Scorn. Derision. Ridicule. Contempt. This is our response to the world. So Kafka, and those like him, feel very much like home to me. Those at home in the world would call this depression. Even the religious people who are ever seeking a normalcy in that realm, rather than in the morbid lair of the Saints, the inner castle, the self trying of self, the willing alienation from the flesh. I don’t know what to say to them. Like Kafka’s bug, I’m afraid it just comes out as growling, and makes them want to close the door and pretend not to have heard.

“Beguiling and deceptive is the life of the world, fruitless its labor, perilous its delight, poor its riches, delusive its honors, inconstant, insignificant; and woe to those who hope in its seeming goods: because of this many die without repentance. Blessed and most blessed are those who depart from the world and its desires.” — Elder Nazarius

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