This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day,...

Monday December 19, 2011 at 23:55

128 notes

“This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the slopes of the Laurenziberg. I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize in life. I found that the most important or the most delightful was the wish to attain a view of life (and—this was necessarily bound up with it—to convince others of it in writing) in which life, while still retaining its natural full-bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering. A beautiful wish, perhaps, if I had wished it rightly. Considered as a wish, somewhat as if one were to hammer together a table with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: “Hammering a table together is nothing to him,” but rather: “Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing,” whereby certainly the hammering would have become still bolder, still surer, still more real, and, if you will, still more senseless.”

—

Franz Kafka in his diary, 1920, from Cosmopsis. (via mills)

Something something Buddhists something. In all seriousness, though, I feel like this does fit in quite soundly with the Way Of The Tortoise. Thoughts, Mr. Peter Reyes?

(via hungryghoast)

Very much so… The effort of no effort seems to be what Kafka speaks of here, much like the tortoise that moves toward its destination, but does not rush. The tortoise yearns to reach a place, but advances with a slow and steady stride, for it knows that the true aim is not to meet its objective, but to express its true nature; much like the man who hammers together the table because it is what he does.

This post was reblogged from Hungryghoast's Web Presence.