PJ Swift

History

Events just

beyond and before our petty lifespans

feel impossibly distant, forgettable, irrelevant

and quaint

In fact, these events are breathing down

our throats. Breathing for us. Full

primal breaths. In and out. Out

and in.

Where does our wisdom go?

Gained with each breath

and then expired

with final exhalation

lost in history

Curse or privilege?

that all do share

to live our lives

with fresh-formed eyes

all experience unfurled

as if for the very

first times

Kafka's 85th

Kafka celebrated his 85th birthday, which was strange because he died at 40. But 85 was a good age to be and not that implausible considering his penchant for fitness and good eating. Perhaps, in an alternate life, penicillin was discovered just a little bit earlier, averting his early demise. Or, somehow, in this alternate scenario, Kafka had managed to avoid contracting TB. Kafka would live on. Of course, there was the Holocaust to consider. The 85-year-old Kafka must have evaded that by achieving literary fame sometime in the 30s, perhaps with a Nobel Prize, and consequently being invited to the US before the full brunt of 1938. Maybe Kafka settled in Hollywood for a while and had a role in writing a few misconceived, unproduced screenplays. He would spend those years in the company of other central European exiles, among them Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Thomas Mann. 85-year-old Kafka would have known a cinema he might not have imagined. Perhaps there was a meeting with Hitchcock about a possible adaptation -- with Welles, there would be one for sure. After the war, Kafka returned to Europe. Would he succumb to Prague again, enduring a communist regime, perhaps pressed upon to create works of propaganda, leading to his next exile? Or would he go straight to West Germany, fortifying his spot as the Great German writer? Or would he choose Vienna or Switzerland instead as his base as the doyen of letters? Kafka would be back in Prague for celebrations of his 85th birthday. The city was in the midst of the Prague Spring, enjoying freedoms and artistic renaissance. Young filmmakers of the New Wave and the progressive playwright Vaclav Havel would flock to him to pay respects and request permission for adaptations and imaginative stagings of his work. How much would he marvel at this world, or would he simply, wizenedly, be innately of it? In less than two months, Soviet tanks would drive him out of his city again. People might even describe those moments as Kafkaesque. But by now, he would be accustomed to this living cliche and know how not to let it affect the true essence of being Kafka.