Borges in his short story “Kafka and his Precursors” makes the point that as he came to read more of Kafka, he could ‘recognise his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods’. Borges lists Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany
I don’t believe that I have ever met a single person who in the long run in his ordinary human relationships, in normal everyday life (and what else is it all about?), could be more hopeless than I.
A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.
Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd said of the absurd If a good play must have cleverly constructed story, these have no story or plot to speak of; if a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical…
Abracadabra, well that’s a word to conjure with! Words are all like that, magical and like charms, conjuring visions and images and sometimes like talisman, fending off demons. Another way of putting this is to say that words are concrete objects, that they have a taste, a texture, a shape that fills the mouth, distorting…
MindReadings 