Kafka | Loneliness is my only purpose, a great temptation to me

Many years later, after I finally understood Kafka a little, I suddenly realized that my world had lost its purity, and at the same time, my desire for free will was almost uncontrollable.

"There will never be resistance unless they awaken; but they will not awaken unless they rebel."

The contradictory phrase "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is very suitable for describing the state I am in.

If you have been in some simple, ignorant happiness, suddenly awakened, turn around and look, everything is business as usual, but it has lost a certain color, a certain color that you cannot describe, like a veil covering the original happy life, everything can be touched and invisible, but it feels very far away.

From that moment on, you fall into self-contradiction, you want to stay away, and you are unwilling.

On the one hand, you have a premonition that a vain, fearful, absurd, dark future is coming upon you, and it will not be long before you will shatter this fragile happiness in front of you, and even this happiness is an illusion of delusion, although it makes people happy and peaceful from the bottom of their hearts.

On the other hand, your cowardice, sensitivity, and fear prevent you from escaping from this senseless stupid happiness, which begins to make you suspect that your happiness is blinded, meaningless, and cyclical.

When you finally realize "resistance" and "awakening," you realize what a huge institution you are in front of—a confusing society, a gloomy world, a temple where there is light, truth, and freedom, but you can't get you into it.

For a long time, I was in this contradiction, and I couldn't tell the outside world, they would say that you were sick and moaning, they would say that you were utopian, they would say that when you faced real pain, you knew how beautiful it was to be.

What they don't know, however, is that it is precisely because I see this pain of the future that I am plunged into a great contradiction.

I later read Notes on the Basement, I read Steppenwolf, and I read the passage "There is a certain kind of person in the world: he thinks that he himself— whether justified or not— is a particularly dangerous, particularly unreliable, and endangered sprout of nature, and he always feels that he is endangered, unprotected, and seems to be standing on a narrow and narrow cliff tip, and with the slightest push of external force, or a slight dizziness, he will fall into the abyss." One characteristic of these types of people is that for them, suicide is the most likely way they die, at least as they imagine. ”

I realized that this group, which has existed since ancient times, "is often people who feel deeply guilty for developing their personality, and that self-destruction is their fate to return to nothingness." ”

But "in this category of people, there are people who are very tough and brave, and whose desire to live is very strong." ”

The reason is that they have been in a state of struggle with life all their lives, and even in despair, pain, and fear, they are still unyielding.

But although I understood them and was aware of similar qualities in myself, I did not fully agree with them, and the fundamental reason was that I could not completely abandon the illusion of happiness, like a man with a knife in his neck, still breathing heavily, struggling, and thinking with all his might.

At the end of the day, I am the man who remains in the "land of one inch" described in Crime and Punishment, and I am caught up in self-contempt and seclusion, envious of the extreme romantics, praying for their salvation.

Until I began to understand Kafka.

Some people say that Kafka almost sees the world with the eyes of a psychopath, observes himself, doubts his own value, so his view of reality and art appears more complex, deeper, and even mysterious.

For me, this misconception of being a "psychopath" stems from a sense of unspeakable contradiction.

It is precisely because it is difficult for words to express inner feelings, Kafka's words are full of various obscure symbols, flashing dialogue, gloomy scenes, mysterious atmospheres, absurd plots, and changeable characters.

The combination of complex factors makes it difficult to understand what Kafka was trying to say: religion, philosophy, emotion, politics, life and death, human nature, meaning...

No matter which direction you start to interpret, it will produce a feeling of inexhaustibility, like a road full of forks, where there is no end, but where to go can form an avenue. Before Kafka, my understanding of literature was the exposition of love and philosophy, and the vast majority of literature expressed these two kinds of themes (if religion was also a branch of philosophy), but in Kafka,corpus, this inertial interpretation hit a bottleneck and led my understanding of him to the wrong end.

Until one holiday, I held a copy of "The Castle" for three consecutive days, kept thinking about it, and suddenly a thought appeared in my mind: Kafka may only express consciousness and no theme.

If there is no theme, then there is no complex symbol of love, philosophy, etc., just pure rational consciousness, wandering in the real world full of thematic elements, what he sees, hears, and feels is the difference between rational consciousness and the subjective experience of the body, and the confusion, boredom, despair, and loneliness brought about by this difference are all conflicts that consciousness and the real world are incompatible.

At that moment, I understood Kafka with great empowerment, with this consciousness, all of Kafka's content has traces to follow, no theme, no focus, just a pure soul traveling in a strange world, everything is so absurd and bizarre, everything is incomprehensible, when this theme of consciousness tries to integrate into the world to experience the emotions of others, it suffers so much frustration that he is confused: What is the nature of this world? What is the nature of human nature? What is the point of order?

After understanding Kafka's off-topical questions, my excitement overflowed my chest, and I danced with my hands, and all the questions did not need answers, I did not have to think hard, I did not have to worry about it, I did not have to be angry, and all that really attracted me was the lonely floating, ghostly consciousness.

But I still felt angry, desperate, and sad, and my mind began to see a ruined castle, a figure walking in the snow, a ghost rejected by everyone, a rotten and ridiculous court, a huge beetle that had been disemboweled, a huge door of law, a skinny and hungry artist.

If Kafka's long stories "The Castle" and "Judgment", the novella "Metamorphosis", "In exile", etc., laid a layer of nightmare-like fog for me, let me wander away from it, my consciousness drifted, my soul was free and happy, and let me completely escape from reality. His short stories resonate with me tremendously, almost every one of them is the cry of a free soul, it is an accusation that shakes people's hearts, and under this accusation is an incomparably deep sorrow, which is pinned in words, detached from all reality, crossing the river of time for a hundred years, and hitting the soul.

The magic of Kafka's writings is that he deliberately depicts not mesmerizing scenes, but bland phenomena: in his writing, the mysterious and grotesque world is more of a combination of carefully observed details of life; the unpretentious, deep metaphorical performance produces a shocking effect from the almost unsympathetic, yet gripping calmness.

The subject matter of his writing, like his life experience, has no thrilling heroic deeds, no shocking artist behavior, neither spring breeze triumph nor poverty; neither smooth sailing nor turbulent displacement. An ordinary civil servant, reading, employment, love, divorce, illness, writing, death, like the life of each of us, any indomitable soul in this boring and desperate reality, can not avoid great suffering.

As Kafka said to his friend Jaruch: "The bland thing itself is inconceivable." I'm just writing it down. The "inconceivable" that Kafka said lies in his confusion about all this, his hatred and helplessness toward reality, his desire and fear of emotion, his yearning for truth and longing for loneliness, and these contradictions and conflicts further strengthen his incomprehension of society. In his confusion, he longed for loneliness, and in his letter to his friend Brod, he wrote: "... In fact, loneliness is my only purpose, a great temptation to me. ”

For Kafka, fear was everywhere, both in life and spiritually, and had become a subconscious pursuit. In this way, he regarded fear as necessarily justified, and in a letter to his girlfriend, Mylena, he wrote: "... Without having to talk about what will happen to me in the future, one thing is for sure—I can only live far away from you: to fully acknowledge that the existence of fear is justified, more than the recognition required by fear itself, and I do so not out of any pressure, but ecstatically pouring my whole body and mind into it. ”

Who could have imagined how deeply these words touched me: I never imagined that one could make fear, loneliness, despair a necessary condition for survival, but Kafka showed me the possibility that one no longer seeks to escape from suffering, but to understand and accept all that is dark, to coexist with it, or even to blend in.

Kafka's novels are unique in their novelty, and the stories he narrates have neither a main line of development throughout, nor the development and sublimation of personality conflicts, the traditional concept of time and space disintegrates, and the shackles of describing scenes and arranging stories are broken.

Strong social emotions, deep inner experience and complex perverted psychology are contained in the manifestation of contradictions: on the one hand, the naturalistic depiction of human fireworks, seven passions and six desires, and human conditions, clear, true and clear; on the other hand, the events and processes described are not coordinated, but the whole often makes people confused, and even makes people feel absurd, which is the typical Kafka.

This detachment from reality and the creation of stream-of-consciousness realism give Kafka's novels the ability to have a certain illusion.

I was naturally good at constructing illusions, real, illusory, every particular scene, every particular person, in my mind will produce some kind of unique illusion, which may be lying under a clear lake looking at the moon, may be a fiery red sunset facing the sea, may be a lonely desert full of winds and sand.

I think Kafka took this illusionary talent to the extreme, so that he could express these virtual illusions in the form of words, and even confuse the illusions and reality.

I used to feel like I was outside the snow of a castle in the middle of the city, and when I sat in my desk, I felt like I was in a low, dark courtroom, walking on the night road as if I were transforming into an ugly beetle lying on the bed looking up at the ceiling.

Every time the illusion appeared, I felt like a beetle, ugly, but Kafka's experience injected strength into my heart at the same time, making me love him even more.

The consolation given to me by "The Castle" is to accept that I am not understood by the outside world, and in the long-term sense of alienation, I have longed for the gloomy and dilapidated abandoned buildings, the ruins of the wind and sand, the empty Gobi, and the return to loneliness.

After a long time, this alienation and strangeness became the master of the inner world, and I was no longer troubled by this, but indulged in this narrow and vast world, refusing others to enter, I swayed in the world of reality and self-illusion, and every time I hated reality a little more, I became more obsessed with the private world; the more i was angry with reality, the more peaceful the vain world became.

Between the intricacies of the two worlds, my illusory world has been expanding, and I have become even more addicted.

I realized that, like K of Castle, I was a ghost outside of reality, not understood, not eager to be understood, and although I didn't fit in, I still tried to fit into this environment.

Reality has not changed me, it has puzzled me, but it has not made me miserable, in this reality, I am just a floating consciousness outside, a foreigner.

Loneliness is the norm for ghosts, and although I occasionally crave to be understood, as the Hungry Artist says, before the artist dies, he longs for others to understand his hungry art, and rejects his art to be understood, and this lonely self-contradiction is that there is no food for me in reality, and I would rather starve, or even die of hunger.

The consolation that "Judgment" gives me is to tolerate the ugliness of the outside world and suppress the anger in my heart.

In dissecting myself, I realized that there was an irrepressible anger in my body and mind, an anger that was a natural hatred of ugliness, and that in the face of all hypocrisy, illusion, injustice, this anger often made me lose my mind and produce some desire to destroy.

In Kafka, I see not this irrepressible intellect, but more extreme sensitivity, and he transforms this figurative anger into a strong inner accusation, and I am not sure whether this is the right thing to do, but in me I have seen a scene in which the thugs are coerced into torturing the security guards in court.

At that time, I deeply felt that my enemy was not the existence that I could face, but the higher powers, institutions, systems, and laws that I could not face, and even if I defeated the first level, there were still countless layers of organs waiting for me.

It turns out that even if I, like Raskolnikov, angrily smash people with an axe, I can't defeat this ugly reality.

At first, this realization made me desperate and angry, and slowly I experienced the romance of "Judgment" of self-death—self-destruction is probably the most powerful indictment.

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