An Intercourse with Ghosts |
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“The easy possibility of letter-writing must -- seen merely theoretically -- have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people could communicate by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold -- all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.” -- Franz Kafka
From 'The Libyrinth': 'Franz Kafka - Links'. From http://rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/kafka.links.html |
Introduction |
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WELCOME to An Intercourse with Ghosts. A non-profit, no-strings-attached, online collection of works by Franz Kafka. As of February 20, 2000 there are 69 texts available. They can be downloaded as individual text (.txt) files or all in one zipped HTML file. I feel that this has given me the most incredible and wonderful thing that I have ever been given. And also the worst. It's a mixed bag. I have been taken to the... absoloutely to the depths of extreme terror by this. I've had my whole soul undermined by it, on the one hand. On the other hand, in one sense, my experience has been about finding joy.These works have been collected from others, the net or typed myself. All thanks, credit, respects and acknowledgments to respective websites, translators, copyright owners and typists. Don't ask me any interpretive questions about the texts because I don't have your answers. I don't even have mine. 'The Castle is nonsensical by rational standards. This is Kafka's way of saying reason is not enough. He has told us through Milena that he is always trying to explain the inexplicable. But he never explains. In The Castle he makes no attempt to persuade the reader that events should follow like this. We are given a picture and told in effect: 'This is how it is.'' The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognised as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.'My stories are a kind of closing of one's eyes,' Kafka wrote. |
Contents |
