In limbo
Time passes and nothing much gets done. The weather has turned cold and I realize the clothes I brought in July are both worn and insuffient. There are lots of things that need doing here in the apartment - people ask where I am when I call because of the strange hollow sound. My steps echo so I am mostly barefoot. The floors are always warm here. Strange how warm the indoors are, and how cold the outdoors. In Auckland it’s often the other way around.
I reread ‘Talking to Mr. K.’, a story I wrote some time ago. It’s a fictional interview with Franz Kafka, but I really do feel as if I have met him under that tree by Lake Naiwasha in Kenya. His responses to my questions are true quotes attributed to him in real life. Now, when I read his words again, I am struck by the inherent desperate truth that they contain.
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive, needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.
and
I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp…. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure… would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness.
and on reading:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
