Notes

9th of June, 2006

Kafka to Felizia: "Had you not been lying on the ground among the animals, you would have been unable to see the sky and the stars and then wouldn't have set free. Perhaps you wouldn't have survived the terror of standing upright. I feel much the same; it is a dream you have dreamt for us both".

14th of June 2006

Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg on Kafka: "...And man, in the Midrashic view, is the meeting point of the two kinds of dust, of the one and the many. Man in chained to imcompatible universes of being; and yet within his chains he feels unaccountably that all possibilities are his. There's no error; yet he cannot live comfortably in either heaven or earth, while he's a free and secure citizen of both".

Her source [Kafka]: "He's a free and secure citizen of the world, for he's fettered to a chain which is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly space, and only so long as nothing can drag him past the frontiers of the world. But simultaneously he's a free and secure citizen of heaven as well, for he's also fettered by a similarly designed heavenly chain. so that if he heads, say, for earth, his heavenly collar throttles him, and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly one does the same. And yet all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering".

16th of June 2006

From Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg: "Human beings are driven to dominate external space, to act out their vertiginous freedoms. But vertigo then drives them inwards again, to construct prison houses of safety from the mighty waters. These do not cure the vertigo; they merely exclude it".

"... The worse thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she can't reconstitute herself. You can thereby "unmake her world" by making it impossible for her to use language to describe what she has been".

25th of June 2006

Hannah Arendt: "Nur von den Dichtern erwarten wir wahrheit (nicht von den Philosophen, von denen wir Gedachtes erwarten)".

4th of July 2006

Kafka [I think I read this in connection to S. Zweig]: "Yesterday it occured to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no "Mutter", and to call her "Mutter" makes her a little comic.... "Mutter" is particularly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with Christian splendor, Christian coldness".

15th of August 2006

Hannah Arendt "We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they're crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretriveable shut off the past."