176
PARTISAN REVIEW
"It doesn't matter," I said. "I could at least look at her all the
better."
"Did you like her?"
"She has wonderful blue eyes," I said.
Kafka was astonished.
"You noticed that at once?"
"I make a study of eyes. They tell me more than words," I
said pompously.
But Franz Kafka did not hear. He gazed gravely into the dis–
tance.
"All my friends have wonderful eyes," he said. "The light of
their eyes is the only illumination of the dark dungeon in which I
live. And even that is only artificial light."
He laughed, gave me his hand, and went into the house.
He once said about insomnia, from which he suffered:
"Perhaps my insomnia only conceals a great fear of death.
Perhaps I am afraid that the soul-which in sleep leaves me-will
never return. Perhaps insomnia is only an all too vivid sense of sin,
which is afraid of the possibility of a sudden judgment. Perhaps in–
somnia is itself a sin. Perhaps it is a rejection of the natural."
I remarked that insomnia is an illness.
Kafka replied, "Sin is the root of all illness. That is the reason
for mortality."
I went with Kafka to an exhibition of French painting in the
gallery of the Graben.
There were some pictures by Picasso: cubist still-lifes and rose–
colored women with gigantic feet.
"He is a willful distortionist," I said.
"I do not think so," said Kafka. "He only registers the deform–
ities which have not yet penetr,ated our consciousness. Art is a mirror,
which goes fast, like a watch-sometimes."
I took him photographs of constructivist pictures.
Kafka said, "They are merely dreams of a marvelous America,
of a wonderland of unlimited possibilities. That is perfectly under–
standable, because Europe is becoming more and more a land of
impossible limitations."
