I am quivering with excitement: Stanley Corngold’s new book on Kafka is here on my desk (I found it for half price online). Heavy, hard-backed, a brown dusk jacket with the picture of a flaming rolled up ball of paper printed beneath the title: Lambent Traces. Ah the pages are parchment coloured and the typeface is movingly clear (how unlike my own book, where there are too many words crammed onto the page)!
I begin to look through the notes and placing stars in their margins to mark books Corngold mentions that I might want to get hold of myself (David Shur’s The Way of Oblivion: how interesting!) Then I begin to read the preface: yes, everything’s right: Corngold seeks to defend Kafka as a writer against those for whom, he says, ‘his stories, like so many stomachs, can be pumped to disgorge contents that were merely ordinary’. Then a nice sentence: ‘My Kafa is an ecstatic’. And another: ‘This bliss, this feeling himself "at the boundary of the human", is connected to his writing …’
I set to work, making little pencil markings in the margins. But I fail; I’m tired, R.M. and I worked until late last night in the office; I’ve been busy all day. I’m not up to the task of the reading, and the pencil marks are the signs of a man losing hold of a book. Now the book is inert, beautiful, but away from me; I’ve failed it and I’ve failed reading. The afternoon is encroaching: through my office windows the vast sky, a whole grey cloud.
Dull panic (I don’t like empty time …) What should I do? I went to the gym yesterday which means I cannot go today. What shall I do? The manuscript needs work; chapter one, ‘A Merciful Surplus of Strength’ needs several large supplements, whole passages are to be excised and replaced, it’s a mess, sixteen thousand messy words.
But I have fallen below work and below everything. There is the only the pressure of the afternoon. Happily, R.M. is here and so are the jolly daffodils I bought this morning. And happily, too, I was able to mark this dead expanse of time here, to do combat against the infinite wearing away by passing through the detour of writing.
But what kind of writing? Only a post, after all – a post because I do not have the merciful strength, Kafka’s, to disappear into literature. Perhaps I only feel the ‘joy of the notebook’ (the joy of this blog) as Steve describes it (‘Moleskin Notebooks …’).
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