Josephine, The Songstress
or, The Mice Nation
Franz Kafka
0
UR SINCER
is called Josephine. Those who have not heard
her sing do not know the power of song. There is no one who is
not carried away by her singing; and this is all the more remark–
able as our race on the whole is not fond of music. The calm of
peace is the best music for us; our lives are hard, and even when
we try to dismiss the cares of the day we cannot lift ourselves to a
thing so remote from our ordinary lives as music. But we do not
complain about this very much, we never go to that extreme; we
consider our greatest asset to be a certain practical shrewdness,
which we find very necessary indeed, and this shrewdness enables
us to smile and so console ourselves for everything, even for miss–
ing the joy of music-that is, if we were to desire it, which never
happens. Josephine is the only exception; she loves music and also
knows how to interpret it; she is the only one, and when she goes,
music will disappear from our lives, who knows for how long?
I have often reflected as to just what really is the situation in
music. We are completely unmusical, so how does it happen that
we can understand Josephine's singing, or at least think we do, for
Josephine denies that we understand her. The simplest answer
would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the
dullest sense cannot resist it. But this would not be a satisfactory
answer.
If
th.is were actually so, we would have had a feeling of
the unusual from the very first and always afterwards, a feeling
that what we heard in this voice was something that we had never
heard before, something we altogether lacked the capacity to hear,
and which Josephine alone, and no one else, made us able to hear.
But in my opinion, it is exactly this that is not so. I do not feel
this, nor have I noticed anything of the sort in others. To our inti–
mates we openly admit that Josephine's singing manifests nothing
remarkable as singing in itself.
Is it really singing then? We do have traditions of song, in
spite of our unmusical nature; there was singing in the old days
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