The Weight He Named
On Kafka, and the Effort It Takes When Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment Are Not Yet Settled
“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
The Sentence That Stops You
Franz Kafka wrote those words in a letter to Felice Bauer, the woman he was engaged to and could never quite bring himself to marry. He was not describing a bad week. He was describing the ordinary cost of being himself. The effort of staying upright. The effort of thinking straight. The effort of remaining a person in the world.
Read it again, slowly. He did not say he could have built a house.