Caffeine

Caffeine is the greatest temptation when I work but it is also a great hindrance – yesterday’s espresso makes me feel tired today; halfway through my workday and I am already drained. How to resist going out to buy an Irn-Bru so that at least some of the afternoon is salvaged? But that would only make me tired this evening. Best to endure these hours instead, but doing what? My friends are also working, but it is a beautiful day …

A lovely vignette from a little book on Kafka. It is 1922, he is in love with Dora Diamant, a nineteen year old girl from a Hassidic background. Kafka himself has just turned forty, but they are in love and no longer does he seek to remain a distance from her as he did from Felice. ‘Felice had talked about furniture; Dora read him the royal verses of Isaiah’.

Kafka was a changed man; he broke with Prague, moved with Dora to Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, into a small apartment where his prized solitude was not possible and never missed. Dora reports how he liked her to stay with him while he write and how, at times, sitting on the sofa she fell asleep when he worked very late.

I transcribe these lines a little sadly, knowing that the idea of creating a weblog to assemble such vignettes is of little use. I will have forgotten I wrote this before a week has ellapsed. I always wondered what it would be to come across pieces I had forgotten writing; this happens often now. When did I write, say, that little piece on Antelme? I have no idea, and even though I can read from the bottom of the post what date I wrote it on, I can remember nothing of the circumstances.

Sometimes, happily, I can incorporate such posts in the book I am writing. The prose of the book is enlivened thereby – a sudden change of pace, of formality, of tone makes the text more fresh, more unexpected; something happens in the text – a leap, an acceleration, a swerve…. Still, more important to me is the silence which surrounds each post: when was it written? On what kind of day? What was it that allowed those words and not others to coalescene? Or even for words to have been formed at all?

The last of these questions is important. Plenty of posts go unfinished. A strength is required to leap from paragraph to paragraph, or even from sentence to sentence. Sometimes words themselves do not come together; a fog descends, nothing can be thought. At others, usually after caffeine, great leaps occur, ideas, half-forgotten, call out to other ideas, a little  swarm is formed. Happiness: one paragraph gives birth to another and the whole post rises shakily into the air like the Wright brothers’ aeroplane (that’s something Steve wrote to me once of a post I deleted that same day (R.M. didn’t like it); does he remember? Have I remembered rightly?)

No caffeine for me. I will have to last until tomorrow morning’s coffee. Gradually, over the next hour or two, the withdrawal symptoms will cease from the half cup of green tea I always allow myself at noon, and it will possible to return to the book.