Posted by There is something calming and creative about the dead of night. The night allows consciousness to roam free from what Colin Wilson called “the triviality of everydayness”.
Franz Kafka, the reclusive German writer who explored themes such as alienation from society, existential anxiety and the absurdity of everyday life, liked to write at night.
He was a classic “outsider”, an observer, a pilgrim moving through this world without attachment. He wrote for his own mental development, not for fame or fortune, and died in 1925 almost unknown, leaving behind a large number of unpublished manuscripts, including great works of imagination such as The Trial.
He wrote to a friend:
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing.
For outsiders, writing is a private, therapeutic, way that such sensitive souls can come to terms with their place in this physical world. But writing is a solitary life.
In My Other Life, Paul Theroux discussed his association with Anthony Burgess, both agreeing that writing was a lonely pursuit. Theroux said:
I had no friends in England. I had numerous acquaintances. I had no friends anywhere. Burgess said the same thing. Friendship in an intimate sense, implying sacrifice and love and unquestioning willingness to confide, is almost impossible for a writer.
This was Kafka’s problem, as it was for Hesse, Hemingway, Greene and others. After the breakup of Kafka’s marital engagement, he was inwardly relieved, and wrote in his diary:
I can once more carry on a conversation with myself.
He then launched into his greatest work of imagination, The Trial.
Night often is a special time for writers. A time when the imagination is free and creative.
The Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer wrote about this time in his poem Baltics:
You might wake up during the night/and quickly throw some words down/on the nearest paper, on the margins of the news/(the words radiant with meaning!)/but in the morning: the same words don’t say anything/scribbles, slips of tongue/Or fragments of the great nightly writing that drew past?
It would be easy to say that these writers were unhappy. Kafka’s German translator, Michael Hofmann, references Albert Camus as someone who can sound like Kafka, with a similar lonely outlook on this absurd seemingly pointless world we inhabit. Hofmann quotes Camus:
One should think of Sisyphus as happy.
Even if the lonely pursuit of writing at night seems like Sisyphus’ burden of endlessly pushing a heavy boulder up a hill only for it to fall down again as he nears the top of the hill, it is really not that way.
They are making progress in understanding the nature of existence.
The loneliness of these writers is actually happiness.
11 February 2024
[Book review: Franz Kafka – “The Trial”]
Piers Morris Blogspot 