Wings To Fly

“Curiously enough,” he added, “Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.”

Vladimir Nabokov, on Kafka's story The Metamorphosis, in a lecture to his students at his Cornell class which was published as Lectures on Literature.

via Futility Closet

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Which brings me up to my favorite INXS song, one of my favorite rock songs of all time, indeed.



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Something Michael Hutchence might have appreciated is the following quote. [If someone wants to ask me for some stunning secrets not revealed in the report of Hutchence's autopsy, please send me an email, or promise to buy me a drink at the pub.]

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

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In fact, despite the existential despair we think of when his name is mentioned and, while Kafka's death was horrific (he slowly starved because TB of the larynx made it almost impossible for him to swallow {ironically, tragically, the final crisis came while he was trying to correct the galleys for his story "The Hunger Artist"}) he didn't want to die. He was otherwise happy and he was in love. He even proposed to his new(ish) and bestest girlfriend, Dora Diamant, not long before he passed away (as she stroked his forehead with a damp cloth.)

Sad.

Then she burnt a great wad of his papers...

“I passed by the brothel as though past the house of a beloved.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka

E@L


[Also an enormously entertaining read is Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature - available online]