Kafka är skitkul tycker jag. Upplevelsen beror bara av perspektivet, eller hur? Jag har nu inte läst så mycket Kafka: tyckte flera av böckerna var trista som fan och bara tysta och prassliga kopior av mitt eget liv och frustrerande erfarenheter så jag föredrog livet eftersom ölen var godare IRL.
”Kafka hade inte heller så roligt”,
sa Akademibokhandelns reklambyrå en gång med sina T-shirts och nu kan man köpa en nytillverkad ful som fan sådan.
Josef K stötte jag på en hel del – i varje fall den variant som musikaliskt äntrade scenen på Smålands Nation på 80-talet. Hey hey så jäkla skoj det var! Eller hur, ni levande och döda!?!
Skoj är en sak. Realism en annan. En tredje är vad R.L.Stevenson en gång så vackert skrev om ”det nya året och det gamla”. ”Dark forebodings” och mörka föraningar, som jag och en nära vän talade om för en tid sedan. Vackert skrivet är det i varje fall, av mannen som gav oss bland annat ”Svarte Riddaren”, ”skattkammarön” och ”Dr Jekyll och Mr Hyde”:
”To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Christmas Sermon, 1900
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