In the period between September 1917 and April 1918, while his world was in shambles (the Spanish Flu, the October Revolution, the Great War) Franz Kafka, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, took up residence with his sister Ottla, in Zürau, a village in West Bohemia.
Chaos, war, diseases and uncertainty were raging, yet Kafka finds the inner calm to abstract himself from all that suffering, looks inside himself and finds a bottomless well. In addition to compiling his “Blue Octavo Notebooks,” he composes 109 aphorisms, published posthumously in 1931 by Max Brod as The Zürau Aphorisms. Written in luminous, incandescent prose, they deal with good and evil, paradise, and the expulsion from paradise, truth, belief, and suffering.
From the 109th, (and final) aphorism:
You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka
