Sublime

Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided that the man who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless.

Kafka’s “The Burrow,” a tale of creaturely existence reduced to the obsessive and anxious pursuit of self-preservation, is one of the bleakest portrayals in literature of life as a solitude cut off from any mutuality. It is a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society, at a furthest remove from the collective forms

All these traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’

“Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?”

functionary

чрезвычайно долго тер мылом обе щеки, подперши их извнутри языком;

‘I think,’ said Konstantin, ‘that no activity can be solid unless it’s based on personal interest. That is a general truth, a philosophical one,’ he said, resolutely repeating the word ‘philosophical’, as if wishing to show that he, too, had the right, like anyone else, to speak of philosophy.