One could argue that the unshakenness is in fact a form of shakenness, that it’s the flat affect of the traumatized on _just this_ side of the internalization and acceptance process, the phases of grief.
I, too, have only read Kafka in translation, but I think that gap that Beckett identifies is where all the magic happens. Modern—hell, Post-Mod and Meta-Mod, too—life feels like that, at least in this commenter’s experience. I used to be a registered ICU nurse. Every day was a marvel, marveling at myself and all my colleagues, as we could somehow find a way to plod through the same normal shit as anywhere else—pens to be found, printers to unjam, lunches to microwave—while up and down the hallway on either side of us hovered Death in triplicate.
Or perhaps it’s like a framed war correspondence photograph that’s been mounted with a generous matte around it, bevel cut, stark white. Without that space the photograph reads like debris, like a message in transit undelivered. But generously framed in an “unshaken” clean cut rectangle of factory-fresh negative space, it lifts the content of the photo out and into some other space. Somebody’s probably written that much more authoritatively than I just attempted it.
One could argue that the unshakenness is in fact a form of shakenness, that it’s the flat affect of the traumatized on _just this_ side of the internalization and acceptance process, the phases of grief.
I, too, have only read Kafka in translation, but I think that gap that Beckett identifies is where all the magic happens. Modern—hell, Post-Mod and Meta-Mod, too—life feels like that, at least in this commenter’s experience. I used to be a registered ICU nurse. Every day was a marvel, marveling at myself and all my colleagues, as we could somehow find a way to plod through the same normal shit as anywhere else—pens to be found, printers to unjam, lunches to microwave—while up and down the hallway on either side of us hovered Death in triplicate.
Or perhaps it’s like a framed war correspondence photograph that’s been mounted with a generous matte around it, bevel cut, stark white. Without that space the photograph reads like debris, like a message in transit undelivered. But generously framed in an “unshaken” clean cut rectangle of factory-fresh negative space, it lifts the content of the photo out and into some other space. Somebody’s probably written that much more authoritatively than I just attempted it.