Again I’m struck by the notion that mankind is completely insignificant. Reading Kafka’s diaries must have something to do with it. There is something glorious, a feeling of the world’s meticulously epic nature, unembellished, completely lacking in grandeur, when reading Kafka. Kafka always feels to me as one whose writing is to be read as that of a dead writer, but that this sensation was there even when he was still alive, even when he was writing it. In my life, at this moment in time, Kafka is to be read while listening to John Maus, to Ariel Pink, to Popol Vuh. Death, death, death is in them all. These musics, though so much more than just this, nevertheless always point to death. They point to lost times, lost worlds, and the cosmic. Yes, that’s what Kafka reads like to me. He makes man kind so strange, so fairy tale-like, that one feels as though this is a different species being documented here, with defunct behaviours and customs. But no, this is mankind and it is still the same. The attention Kafka gives to customs, to social etiquette and to systems is never incidental. He is fascinated by them – legal documents, enumerated tables, lists, manners, the lot. But he seems to always struggle with these systems. Struggling, it seems, not against them, as it may at first seem. The longer I read Kafka I come to realise that what I’m witnessing is not a man raging against confinement but, rather, truly fascinated and perplexed by this confinement – these endless confinements – and trying to understand them and their workings, not simply free himself from them. One gets the impression that Kafka engages with these systems not as his restrictors but as the very prism through which he may reflect upon his own consciousness at all.
Looking at things in such a way, the insignificance, the insectness of mankind, doesn’t seem to sweep everyone along with it. If anything, the meagreness of the multitudes seems to give the individual even more significance. I don’t know why I’m saying this, it just seems to make sense right now. Perhaps this is because in its complete form the above sentence would read: ‘the meagreness, the insignificance of mankind seems to me to give the individual even more significance, because this individual is me. And it is always “me”’.
