Fundament represents a radical desublimation of the obsession with sex and death. In its unflinching presentation of the twin poles of mortality, what was previously obscene has shifted to center stage, to the stomach’s chagrin…
In recent days every passing hour carried you farther away to the city and, across the distance, brought what is most yours still closer. For you will not avert your gaze; you will awaken intimacy from afar.
Franz Kafka and Max Brod met at Prague’s Charles University in 1902, where they were both students of the law. When Kafka shared his first short story with his classmate, Brod proclaimed his life’s mission to be the sharing of … Continued
A: Didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate.
B: People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate? Well, they need some basic plumbing lessons. And they have clearly lost all human morality. They’re setting fire to the future… There is no greater freedom than the right to survive.
A: Listen, I hear you: Muenster is Muenster, no matter how you slice it.
“Post-Christian man” is not the same as “pre-Christian man”. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.
The laughter said: this is where the play ends, but that’s fine, because I know what happens next. There is no need for you to finish your story, because I can finish it for you.
My imagination, virile as it is, having never been prostituted or jaded, is an enemy for me; it is always in keeping with a young and pure heart, violent with repressed desires, so that the slightest sentiment cast into my solitude makes ravages.
Too often, modern academics approach Benjamin as a Rorschach test, gazing at the text and thereby gauging their own predilections toward Marxism, poststructuralism, sociology, Jewish mysticism, urban theory, or modern-day Dadaism. No thinker in modern history is so overdetermined by the pet theories and partial readings of others…
But the one thing I have learned from the entire experience is a terrible thing: that the moral cowardice of the American intelligentsia is virtually complete.
She was much surprised that I was to act instead of write. I guess she thinks I can’t do it. She said I might find that I only wanted to act as a way of getting experience for writing. I was rather amused…
