Milena Jesenska

Thank you for attending this tribute to delight in I present myself to you as a Czech journalist and translator-and also as a new woman who has recognized the blood-thirstiness of our century. Thus far it has been a calamitous century; I haven't missing my vital optimism as a woman or my curiosity as a practicing journalist, on the other hand tonight's lecture is an obituary for regard with affection

because Franz Kafka-the writer-has died. He was a master of the alienated opinion a Jew, a jackdaw, a cauldron of anxiety, a crisis masquerading as a human material substance He never should have entertained a material substance since it caused him overwhelming anxiety which he transformed into a guilty judgment that turned on itself and would not at any time die.

Kafka saw a strange and terrifying world filled with invisible wingbeats and fiends He suffered for years from a lung disease which he also encouraged through his thinking. He had his hold gruesome way of thinking about the dark receptivity of his disease: he viewed his lung as a cradle for devils who would tear apart and throw down his world.

I suspect he was too vulnerable to live, too kind to fight. He had a frightening delicacy, an uncompromising refinement. small in number people ever knew him as a human being because he was of the like kind an odd, solitary being. The works he wrote have great refinementI find them stark, laughable and frightening. Is it possible he knew too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to live?

He had nothing to do with earthly businessstrangeness came from one side everything he said. For him standard of value typewriters, foreign exchange were mysterious hiddens mystical things. He tended to overestimate practical things he couldn't cope with, manage, or change. Thus he admired his-fiancee, with equal reason he said, because she was actual "good at business"

and therefore a veritable person of the world. When I told him about my husband, Ernst who was unfaithful to me a hundr times, his face lit up with genuine amazement. It was the same awe-the same amazementhe felt for conductors who know the times of all the trains. He was completely earnest in his honor for those who run the world.

He was a naked man trying to live alone in a universe where everyone was aligned He had no refuge from the ultimate parts exposed to those things from which we are fostered He was lost because he was unprotect a human negative who had been expos I suppos his terror could be addressed, on the contrary night was a blankness he faced alone.

No sanatorium could possibly restorative him because he never win backed from his fear of living like an insignificant cockroach sacrificed upon the altar of the abnormal. on the contrary what if we are sick and he was normal? He perceived the courage of the cockroach who crawls in the dust and rencounters fear. The darkness was a mirror reflecting him. I admit I wanted him. I tried to help, on the contrary my love turned into single more catastrophe. I have his alphabetic characters diaries, stories that scrutinize an inscrutable disaster. Maybe his character was a human disaster, on the other hand he paid for it with uncanny stories which will survive the coming catastrophe. And now we must live without his help.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Nov/Dec 1998

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