Max Brod, to the best of my knowledge, is dead, poor bastard. That, I conjecture, is what being friends with Kafka ends with; deadness. What a horror: my hair, if that is what it is, was whored, smeared upside against the fracture of my skull, brittle follicle remnants, arching, crestfallen, trying to form a hirsute whole. This, I can assure, was not a pretty sight, sadly enough for me, I suppose. Perhaps a Kafkaesque hair cut is in order, stiffened and terrorized by a monstrous paternal abusiveness. Poor black-lunged bastard. In one story a character, who we are led to believe is Kafka himself, throws himself from the parapet of a bridge into the black-roil of channel-water after his cuntish father admonishes him for wanting to marry. Such savage infanticide is criminal.
I now address an appeal to the healthy: don’t persist in reading nothing but healthy books, acquaint yourselves also with so-called pathological literature, from which you may derive considerable edification. Healthy people should always, so to speak, take certain risks. For what other reason, blast and confound it, is a person healthy? Simply in order to stop living one day at the height of one’s health? Damned bleak fate…I know now more than ever that intellectual circles are filled with philistinism, I mean, moral and aesthetic chickenheartedness, Timidity, though, is unhealthy.
I now address an appeal to the healthy: don’t persist in reading nothing but healthy books, acquaint yourselves also with so-called pathological literature, from which you may derive considerable edification. Healthy people should always, so to speak, take certain risks. For what other reason, blast and confound it, is a person healthy? Simply in order to stop living one day at the height of one’s health? Damned bleak fate…I know now more than ever that intellectual circles are filled with philistinism, I mean, moral and aesthetic chickenheartedness, Timidity, though, is unhealthy.
Robert Walser (The Robber)
