(no subject)

Kafka's Diaries, p 271 (1914):

If I am not very much mistaken, I am coming closer. It is as though the spiritual battle were taking place in a clearing somewhere in the woods. I make my way into the woods, find nothing, and out of weakness immediately hasten out again; often as I leave the woods I hear, or I think I hear, the clashing weapons of that battle. Perhaps the eyes of the warriors are seeking me through the darkness of the woods, but I know so little of them, and that little is deceptive.



Reflections upon the Path, Bloom

Riding three days and nights he came upon the place, but decided it could not be come upon.

He paused therefore to consider.

This must be the place. If I have come upon it, then I am of no consequence.

Or this cannot be the place. There is then no consequence, but I am myself not diminished.

Or this may be the place. But I may not have come upon it. I may have been here always.

Or no one is here, and I am merely of and in the place. And no one can come upon it.

This may not be the place. Then I am purposeful, of consequence, but have not come upon it.

But this must be the place. And since I cannot come upon it, I am not I, I am not here, here is not here.

After riding three days and nights he failed to come to the place, and rode out again.

Was it that the place knew him not, or failed to find him? Was he not capable?

In the story it only says one need come upon the place.

Riding three days and nights he came upon the place, but decided it could not be come upon.

(no subject)

What are Bloom's other direct sources? His own reading of Childe Roland, for one, and probably of Tennyson's Holy Grail episode, though no specific details come to mind. And then he's playing on "we are here for an interval only and our place will know us no more" in Pater's "Conclusion"--which quotes what in the Bible, Ecclesiastes? And there's obviously the rider who passes Stevens' Mrs. Alfred Uruguay:

Who was it passed her there on a horse all will,
What figure of capable imagination?
Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose,
As it descended, blind to her velvet and
The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun,
A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,
Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,
Lost in an integration of the martyrs' bones,
Rushing from what was real; and capable?

The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Key dote?