Sublime

She talked a long while and with great feeling. For some reason the idea came into his head that in the course of the summer he might grow fond of this little, weak, talkative creature, might be carried away and fall in love; in their position it was so possible and natural!

I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets.

The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them at

Édouard est intimidé, mal à l’aise, d’autant qu’Anna le pousse à lire ses poèmes au visiteur. Paterne, celui-ci daigne les trouver bons. « Mais pourquoi partir ? demande-t-il. On vit bien, à Kharkov. On peut y mûrir son œuvre, loin du tourbillon superficiel et frelaté de la capitale. Malheureux, celui qui se laisse prendre au miroir aux alouettes.

What seemed to him strangest of all was that his brother Ivan, on whom alone he had rested his hopes, and who alone had such influence on his father that he could have stopped him, sat now quite unmoved, with downcast eyes, apparently waiting with interest to see how it would end, as though he had nothing to do with it.

metempsychosis,

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

“Maybe, Josef, living safely is dangerous. Dangerous and deadly.”