Swimming in the Afternoon

A Clue from Kafka, and an introduction to this section of FP

On August 1914, roughly a month after the opening attack of what would soon become the first World War, Franz Kafka wrote this in his diary:

“Germany invades Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

Kafka kept a diary throughout most of his adult life; I suppose there’s just so much angst and self-reproach his friends would agree to listen to. They probably bought the diary for him in the first place.

“Here, Franz. Happy birthday.”

“It’s not my birth…”

“Just take the fucking diary, Franz.”

Many of the entries are long and rambling, discursive, going off on tangents. Some are preliminary sketches of stories he was working on, ideas he visited and revisited in his diaries before completing in his notebooks. But on this day of all days, that’s the whole entry:

“Germany invades Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

One can well imagine the atmosphere in Prague at the time – the newspapers with their war headlines, the loud conversations in bars and coffeehouses, over dinner, over breakfast, over lunch; right-wing podcasts shouting right-wing things, left-wing podcasts shouting left-wing things; social media lighting up, people taking sides, blaming this one, defending that one, politicians taking the opportunity to sloganeer, pretend to care and send out fundraising emails. And everyone, everywhere, engaging in it: talking, debating, obsessing, reading, arguing.

But not Franz.

Franz went swimming.

I’ve read pretty much every book about Kafka, and every book about the books about Kafka, and I’ve never seen that diary entry cited.

But for me, it is one of the wisest things he ever wrote.

I was in my early twenties, just beginning to write, and having about as much success with it as most do, which is to say none. I was desperate to find my “voice,” that elusive almost mystical admixture of tone and thought and stance, that somehow truest self that through some strange spiritual alchemy emerges through words on a page.

I was beginning to suspect I didn’t have one.

I had plenty of other voices, though. Loud, insistent, hectoring. Some told me what I was supposed to write, some told me how I was supposed to write it, some told me what not to write and some told me not to write at all. There were voices of teachers, of academics, of critics. There were voices of parents, of rabbis, of God (“Whatever you do, Asshole,” he said, “don’t write about me”). I spent my every weekend and evening in bookstores, in magazine shops, reading everything, skipping nothing, in a sort of feverish Johnny Five madness, trying to upload into myself as much literary data as I could, hoping it would result in my producing something I could call my own.

But to no avail. The bookstores themselves became a voice, this one shouting who was being published, what was being published, who was getting reviews, who was selling best. “Genius!” said everyone about everything. So desperate did I become, so utterly lost for answers, that one day, I bought Kafka’s fucking diaries.

How sad is that?

Who the fuck reads Kafka’s diaries?

Me.

I stayed up for hours, reading, searching, hoping that somewhere, on some blessed page, he would write, “Hey, Shalom, just fyi, if I drop dead and Max doesn’t burn my shit the way I told him to, here’s the secret to my writing. PS: Fuck you, Max.”

What I got was this:

Aug 1914: “Germany invades Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”

And it stopped me. It made me laugh, of course - you don’t go swimming when Germany invades Russia. You’re bright, involved, socially aware; you stop everything when Germany invades Russia, you read the news, you go online and see what the pundits say and post a photo of the war on your Insta and express your heartfelt outrage.

But not Franz.

Franz went swimming.

The one thing I already knew about Franz was how single-minded he was in pursuit of his writing. It was a topic of many of his diary entries, and many of his letters to his friends and family (yeah, I’d read those, too; pathetic). And so I was certain that he wasn’t joking, that the crazy fuck really did go swimming that afternoon.

And it was a revelation.

Because Franz was going to do what he had to do to write. He was going to go swimming, have a bite to eat, and spend the night trying his best to wring out a precious drop of his soul. One doesn’t have to look too hard in that entry to hear the “Fuck off” inherent within it. You go bomb each other, said Franz, I have writing to do. I thought then about his stories, too – about men who turn into bugs, about singing mice and thoughtful apes and trials without trials and strange castles nobody gets into – and realized that I heard that same sentiment in them.

“You can’t write stories about Bugmen, Franz,” said Literature.

“Fuck off,” said Franz.

Franz wasn’t the emotionally healthiest human being alive, but when it came to his writing, he was one of the strongest, the most defiant, the most determined. I mentioned in an earlier post that I wished Substack had a “Fuck off, I’m writing” switch. I got the idea from Kafka.

I realized that day I needed to be a bit more Franz in my approach to my own writing. I needed to go swimming in the afternoon. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have a voice, it’s that there were too many other voices in my head, screaming, shouting, hectoring, so loudly and so insistently that I couldn’t hear my voice through them. And I was letting them in.

I began turning the voices off, one at a time. I stopped reading news. I decided to be as single-minded as Kafka was – so single-minded that I even stopped reading him. I stopped reading Vonnegut, Beckett, O’Connor, all my favorite writers - so that in the silence left behind, I could at last hear myself.

What Kafka showed me in that one diary entry was the defiant remove I had to cultivate in myself, in my life, if I was ever going to hear my own voice. That, to me, is what “Kafkaesque” really is - it’s writing that doesn’t give a fuck. Writing that speaks of its writer’s defiant remove. It’s become shorthand between me and my wife, Orli; when one of us had stopped writing or drawing and started watching news or reading pundits or scrolling online, a quick “Swimming in the afternoon, Hon” is all it takes to remind us of what we really need to be doing.

It’s not a question of narcissism or self-interest or ivory towers or living with one’s head in the sand; in later entries, Kafka indeed writes of the war (though as defiantly and Kafkaesquely as ever: “I discover in myself nothing but pettiness, indecision, envy and hatred toward those who are fighting, whom I passionately wish all evil”). It’s that I believe that by examining the world inside us - “the tremendous world inside my head,” as Kafka called it - it is possible to make the outside world a better place. But no amount of political debate will ever fix what’s broken within us.

I wonder now, in this time of incessant voices from hideous machines that are winning their war on us, drowning us beneath a sea of disconnected hectoring voices, if this defiant remove is required not just for writers and artists, but for every human being who wishes to find peace, within themselves and without. By all means let’s solve the world’s problems. But perhaps the way to do that is to start with the world inside our heads. It’s worth a shot.

So you guys go and watch the news and read the pundits.

I’ll be at the pool.

The water’s warm, Franz is calling “Marco,” and Brod made a batch of frozen margaritas. Ugh, he’s such a suck-up.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

NOTE:

In a fantastic new edition of the diaries published by Schocken Books, Ross Benjamin translates the entry as “Germany invades Russia. Swimming lessons in the afternoon.” Which is not only funnier, but makes me even more certain that Franz really did hit the pool that day.

OTHER NOTE:

My wife Orli, who does all the drawings for Fetal Position as well as her own books and projects, has at long last launched her own Substack, “Brained,” which I highly recommend for anyone cursed with a brain. She’s hilarious, insane and as beautifully defiant as they come.