The stairs up to the famous and domineering castle in Prague narrow and widen into and out of a funnel shape you instantly recognize when you see them again a few hours later in a black and white film at the Kafka Museum. That film, a hodgepodge of daguerreotype quality clips, aims to portray the city when the author was a schoolboy. For you, though, it offers the chronological boomerang of seeing the 1000-year-old castle in a film that is a hundred years old even though you just saw the place in real time yourself.
Anyway, the giant castle and Notre Dame-sized church that have been looming over you these past few days turn out to be, once you get up top, part of a mountaintop village. That is a surprise. That it is overrun by tourists less so. Inside the church, for instance, you would need the skills of an American footballer to get to the altar. (In fact, few things are more boring or less distinct one from another than the churches in Europe.)
Oddly, or perhaps predictably, at the bottom of the hill (and not far from the Kafka museum) you can find a no less ornate, if much smaller, church and sit totally alone (as I did) for as long as you like. This was just an obvious signal of how much better it would be were the crowds in Prague (and other such top tourist cities) evenly dispersed throughout a town’s countless attractions instead of all going to the same few spots. In Prague, that means everyone is at that castle, and Charles Bridge, and a few commercial streets. At each, everyone takes pictures of themselves smiling at the place they were supposed to go.
People are part predator, part hoarder, and the phone is ideal for helping us hunt down and capture experience. Yet as any trip like the one I am on, or the past two decades confirm, the ease and volume of how we do this now drowns meaning under a flood of needless images and unnecessary texts. Forgetting to live in the moment is one obvious causality here, as is truth in our post-truth world. No less obvious is how trying to hold onto every moment makes nothing of import or value. Pictures of the cake we had for dessert and the coffee that came with it and this place that is so totally on Instagram . . . we are curators of nothing and that nothing adds up.
By way of local comparison, it is hard not to think of Kafka. What his stories “mean” is famously hard to express. But no reader doubts the weight and humor of what is at stake. Import and value are all too evident, even if they do not translate into something we can simplify with a word like “like” or “share.” Kafka translates poorly into emoticon.
You may remember how the story “In The Penal Colony” includes a machine of many needles that inscribe into the body of a guilty man the law he has broken. Deeper and deeper go the needles until the man dies. As the convict does not know the judgment against him nothing “meaningful” is, in this sense, communicated. Still, the increased depth is real enough and whereas our trillions of communiques capture less and less, Kafka captures the deepest oddity of mythos and meaning, both absolute, sitting cheek by jowl, and yet not aware of each other.
We are addicted to a search for significance and come up only with surface while Kafka makes the sentence written on the convict’s body the sentence that kills him.
In our world are endless pictures without conviction. In his, the sentence is the sentence.
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A snarky post about the phone and tourists seemed inappropriate once Hamas, acting on behalf of their “religion of peace,” slaughtered families, kidnapped partygoers, and sacrificed Palestinians as human shields. But I started the above before the recent news and figured I’d post it. Today, of course, an already desperate part of the world is being reduced to rubble via Israel’s “Made in America” munitions.
You might think, in days like these, that instead of showing up on the streets of New York and London to support their sides, the faithful would gather in churches and mosques and synagogues to express their collective and desperate shame for what is being done in the name of their god. And you might think too that my tribe of liberals would not be so pathetic as to claim “Israel is entirely responsible” too.
Entirely?
But I’ll say more about that another day.
Thanks for reading.
Thinking about this one in comparison to your 2023 post about 9/11.