“It is good to chase one’s dreams, but bad, as it mostly turns out, to be chased by them.”
There are older, and therefore cheaper, editions of this, also known as the Zirau Aphorisms – but this is the newest, and I always go for the newest translations of work, because they tend to build on the older ones and therefore may be more informed, considered and exact. On top of that, here each aphorism comes with a few pages of context, which are very rich and add a great deal to the experience. Some of them even include aphorisms Kafka discarded, of which this is my favourite:
“Sancho Panza, who, it should be said, never boasted of it, was able, over the course of years, in the evening and night hours, to divert his demon—whom he later dubbed Don Quixote—away from himself by amassing a great many chivalry romances and picaresque novels.”
Many of the aphorisms concern Kafka’s obsession with the Biblical Fall, which I found less interesting than the pure notes of invention he was capable of sounding in this abbreviated form, of which the most important for me was:
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.
That’s the sort of thing I picked the book up for, and the sort of thing that makes me sit for an hour with it.
I’ve been thinking for a good while, on and off, about this particular form of writing. Kafka shows its value and its potentials. It’s a wonderful, educational and even sometimes funny little book.
THE APHORISMS OF FRANZ KAFKA (UK) (US+)
