Spurious

... 'the enormous Strindberg', whom Kafka read 'not to read him but rather to lie upon his breast' ...

Robert Calasso, K.

Many are the glosses are commentaries on [Before the Law], which the priest tells Josef K. in the dark cathedral, about the doorkeeper of the Law. The longest, most persuasive gloss is by Kafka himself - it's The Castle. To understand it, one must read all of The Castle, after having replaced each occurrence of the word Castle with the word Law.

from Calasso's K.

He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was 'not suicide, but the thought of suicide'. If he didn't go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: 'You who can't manage to do anything, you want to do this?'

From Calasso's K.

Brad Johnson reviews Spurious at An Und Für Sich.

Nearly everything is totally indifferent to me. Time is passing, boredom is everlasting.

You know, I find myself in this town by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It's also by pure chance that I'm the treasurer here. But if I hadn't been here, I would've been somewhere else and have led the same kind of life. However, I cannot reconcile myself to that. I get really upset when I think about it.

Existence has never answered my questions. Just imagine, to live an entire life, my own life at that, without having found the path to where my deepest needs can be seen and heard! I'll die in silence, which frightens me, without a word on my lips, because there's nothing to say.

Bjoern Hansen, in Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18

Our cosmic terror springs from the memory of the endless night against which God fought his first battle. He partly won, for he made night and day alternate. Man tried to establish the reign of day by conquering the night altogether; he was successful only in his imagination. We sleep not to rest but to forget the night we should have defeated.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.

Joe Bousquet.

I've always been writing, even before I ever tried to write anything. The career of a writer doesn't begin at the moment he begins to write. The career and the writing may coincide earlier or later.

Genet, quoted.

Interview with me by Alex Shephard at Full-Stop.

There is no eternal return, time does not enable nonchalance; rather, it is distress.

Jacob Taubes (cited)