Edited by Max Brod
Translated by Ernst Kaiser, Eithne Wilkins
Exact Change
Franz Kafka
Translated by Ernst Kaiser, Eithne Wilkins
Exact Change
Franz Kafka
(3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)
"The voices of the world becoming quieter and fewer."
young Franz Kafka
Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off your shoes,
yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling
garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your
nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that
hides beneath that, and then the core and the core and the core, then the
remainder and then the residue and then even the glimmer of the undying
fire. Only the fire itself us absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself
be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other.
FK, Prague
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
Franz Kafka with his fiancee Felice Bauer 1917
