Prior to transcribing them on those slips of onionskin, Kafka had written the Zürau aphorisms in two octavo notebooks, among other fragments, some of the same nature and equally penetrating. The numbering follows, almost without exception, the order in which the aphorisms appear in the two notebooks. It is thus impossible to attribute to the sequence a reasoned organization, as we can for example in the case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It’s also impossible to determine why some of the aphorisms on the onionskin sheets are crossed out: they are not of a particular type, and what’s more, some of them are among the most noteworthy. Kafka himself never alluded to these aphorisms either in letters or in his other writings. No evidence exists, therefore, not even indirect evidence, that he intended to publish them. But their very mode of presentation suggests a book of roughly a hundred pages, where each page would correspond to one of the slips of onionskin. This book is like a pure diamond, buried among the vast carboniferous deposits of Kafka’s interior. It would be pointless to seek, among twentieth-century collections of aphorisms, another as intense and enigmatic. If published one after the other, these fragments would occupy twenty or so pages and would be almost suffocating — because each fragment is an aphorism in the Kierkegaardian sense, an “isolated” entity, which must be surrounded by an empty space in order to breathe. This need explains the point of transcribing them one to a page. But even the definition of aphorism is misleading, if we understand that word as currently used to mean “maxim.” Some of these fragments are narrative (for example, 8/9, 10, 20, 107), others are single images (15, 16, 42, 87), and others are parables (32, 39, 88). We find a similarly various texture in Kafka’s Diaries, but here every redundancy, every arbitrariness, every insistency, has been stripped away. In their terseness and in their deceptive clarity, these sentences have an air of finality. They are the rapid brushstrokes of an exceedingly old master, who distills everything into these brief flicks of his wrist, guided by an “eye that simplifies to the point of utter desolation.” That’s how Kafka defined his gaze in a letter of that period.
It’s pointless to set the Zürau aphorisms beside some of the pinnacles of the past. The comparison skews, as though resting on an unstable base. If Kafka writes that “impatience and inertia” are “man’s two deadly sins, from which all the others derive,” it’s futile to look elsewhere for related sentences, whether comparable or conflicting, on the same themes. The same is true when he writes of the three forms of free will, concluding that the three forms are really one and don’t presuppose any will, free or not. Why is this the case? Perhaps because he had “a kind of congenital indifference to received ideas.” Even to the great received ideas. One always gets the impression that Kafka lacked common ground with other great writers, even though he venerated at least a few of them (Pascal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard). But the peculiarity of his aphorisms, their steep, irreducible singularity, reaches such heights as to allow comparison only with other fragments marked by the same peculiarity. Kafka can communicate only with Kafka — and he can’t always do that. It’s hard to tell just how aphorism 8/9—which speaks only of a “stinking bitch, which has littered many times and is already decomposing in places”—relates to those that come before or after it. Indeed Brod quietly deleted it. (Perhaps he thought it clashed with the noble title he had chosen.) And yet this sequence is precisely where all randomness or connection through mere juxtaposition is denied. It’s the only instance of Kafka’s taking pains to give one of his works a visually and spatially unambiguous shape, almost to the point of determining the typographical layout. Each of those sentences presents itself as if the greatest possible generality were intrinsic to it. And at the same time each seems to emerge from vast deposits of dark matter.
Max Brod was a tireless practitioner of a style of psychological analysis not very different from what would one day become the preferred style in women’s magazines, though his is denser and fuzzier and has occasional theological complications. Every so often he dared to provoke Kafka: “Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?” Kafka replied as if from an astral distance: “You write: ‘Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?’ And just before that: ‘I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.’ If you conjoin these two sentences, it’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?’”
Kafka was not a collector of theologies. The word itself was not congenial to him. He rarely named the gods, and he resorted to ruses in order not to attract their attention. To believe in a personal God seemed to him to be, above all else, one of the ways of allowing the “indestructible something” in us to “remain hidden.” That’s the enigmatic formulation found in the fiftieth Zürau aphorism.
He generally spoke of the gods in an oblique fashion. One might argue that his boldest assertion is concealed in a line of his Diaries that says only: “The passage in Hebel’s letter on polytheism.” The reference is to a letter from Johann Peter Hebel to F. W. Hitzig, where one reads: “If the Theological Society still existed, this time I would have written a paper for them on polytheism. I confess to you — since a confession between friends is no less sacred than one before the altar — that it seems more and more obvious to me, and that only the state of captivity and childishness we’re kept in by the faith in which we’re baptized and raised and subjected to homilies has prevented me until now from erecting little churches to the blessed gods.”
Taking all this into account, Kafka’s embarrassment — when subjected by Brod to the manuscript of his most ambitious opus, which would appear in 1921 in two volumes totaling 650 pages, bearing the vaguely grotesque title Paganism Christianity Judaism—could not have been small. Brod had lavished on this book his talent for frightening oversimplification.
Kafka read the manuscript immediately and offered Brod his thoughts on it in a letter. At first we find rather general praise. Then, having endured long explanations of what constitutes paganism, Kafka takes the opportunity to say what the ancient Greeks mean to him — using arguments that have nothing to do, not even polemically, with Brod’s book. Instead we look on with astonishment as Kafka sketches a vision of Greece that includes himself in one corner, like the donor in a medieval altarpiece:
In short, I don’t believe in “paganism” as you define it. The Greeks, for example, were perfectly familiar with a certain dualism, otherwise what could we make of moira and other such concepts? It’s just that they were a rather humble people — as far as religion is concerned — a sort of Lutheran sect. As for the decisively divine, they could never imagine it far enough from themselves; the whole world of the gods was only a way to keep that which was decisive at a distance from the earthly body, to provide air for human breath. It was a great method of national education, which held and linked the gaze of the people, and it was less profound than Hebrew law, but perhaps more democratic (no leaders or founders of religions here), perhaps freer (it held and linked them, but I don’t know with what), perhaps humbler (because their vision of the gods’ world gave rise to this awareness: so, we are not gods at all, and if we were gods, what would we be?). The closest I can come to your conception might be to say: in theory, there exists a perfect earthly possibility for happiness, that is, to believe in the decisively divine and not to aspire to attain it. This possibility for happiness is as blasphemous as it is unattainable, but the Greeks were perhaps closer to it than many others.