Mallarme told Ernest Raynaud, Baudelaires biographer, that when he Mallarme was a young man, he once saw a man

an posting a letter which he balanced preciously at the end of his fingertips like it was a flower whose perfume he was about to sniff. Mallarme, a young man at the time, a student, immediately recognized that the man with the letter was Charles Baudelaire, and greeted him: how are you doing, maitre? Baudelaire replied, well, and yourself? Of course, he took the young student for someone he knew, but whose name slipped his mind. It was the only physical contact between Mallarme and Baudelaire. Kafka, a man who was crazy about letters, would have liked that story. Surely he knew for it is writers legend the story Baudelaire liked to tell of when he was a young man and he came upon Balzac on the street, on a quai on the Left Bank of Paris. Although he didnt know Balzac, he certainly recognized him. And he stopped and hailed him with a great laugh. Balzac replied with another great laugh, and they went off talking to each other. Those laughs bear a great deal of responsibility. When Nietzsche came down from the mountains of Sils Maria in 1882 and wrote the first four books of the Gay Science, he was filled with a rare, unifying vision that had sprung itself upon him and completely turned around his mood. As any moraliste knows, the mood is a cognitive tool it is by the mood that one judges certain intangible but real changes in the world. No barometer is complex enough to allow us to judge our historical moment, with its different forms of existence that are set loose in the quotidian and bump against each other as though in a fair; with its obsessions and routines, its shifting matrixes of exchange, its speeds. Thus, Nietzsche wrote his book with this mood like a muse on his shoulder, and revealed, shyly, like a great secret, in the fourth book, his inspiration and great idea. It was of course the doctrine of the eternal return, announced as though balancing the lightness of the title of the book as the heaviest weight, das grsste Schwergewicht. The dramaturgy here is along the lines of the great philosophical coups de theatres, from Socrates death to Descartes dream: thus, it includes a demon.

What if, one day or night, a demon slinks up to you in your loneliest loneliness and says: your life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again, and countless times again; and there will be nothing new in it, and instead, every pain and pleasure and ever thought and sigh and all the unspeakably smallnesses and greatnesses of your life must return to you and everything in the same series and succession and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again and you with it, dust speck of specks! [My translation]
The eternal return of the same enters the literature of the late nineteenth century through many doors. Nietzsches is the most famous. In the early twentieth century, it enters with a bit less gravity in fact, as a slapstick routine, performed by a po faced clown. The clown, here, is not Chaplin but Kafka, the place is in an early letter to Felice Bauer, his future fianc, but the setting is surely Modern Times, the office version: The time is August 13, 1912.. Franz Kafka is thirty years old although he doesnt look it. He works, now, as a Concipist for the Arbeiter- Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt fur das Konigreich Bohmen. A concipist draws up legal papers and, in Kafkas case, publishes articles about industrial accidents and insurance, as well as engaging in polemics with employers who complain about the cost of workmans compensation. But on the 13th, he is engaged in his other life, which involves his friend Max Brod, who sees in Kafka a great writer. Brod also sees in

Kafka a great saint, and as the years go by, after Kafkas death, an almost supernatural being. But there were no angel wings on Kakfas back when he came over to the Brod household to talk about the first story/essay he was ever to publish. There he met one of Brods brother in laws cousins, a woman who worked for the Lindholm Gramaphone company, Felice Bauer. We have an exact description of the meeting from one of Kafkas first letters to Felice a letter in which Kafka achieves an effect that he will use to deadly purposes in his stories and novels: an exactness that seems not so much of the mirror but through the mirror, a precision that lifts the given fact into the realm of hallucination, without one quite being able to put ones finger on where the threshold is crossed. Like the hallucinatory experience of an industrial accident, where one uncontrolled movement can lead to amazingly devastating consequences. Kafkas is a world crowded with dangerous machines, chthonic gods which are, at the same time, the normal infrastructure of ordinary life. As Kafka tells it, he came into the Brod household late, about nine oclock, when everybody was assembled in the living room, like a threat. The letter which describes the meeting is the 9th of the collection that Felice eventually sold for publication, which made quite a sensation when it was published in the 60s. Elias Canetti wrote a long essay about Kafkas Other Trial. Margaret Drabble wrote a review of the translation in which she pronounced Kafka clinically mad and treated the letters as a case of criminal stalking. For our purposes, beyond their intrinsic literary worth, or perhaps inwoven into that worth, these letters tell us all about the pre-war world in which an insurance lawyer from Prague and the bureau chief of the parlograph division of the Carl Lindstrom Company in Berlin could fall in love, get affianced, and break up. By 1912, insurance had become a large presence in both the political world of labor-capital relations and in the world of finance. It would surely be located by Marx in the world of unproductive labor, even though Kafkas job made him an ally of laborers. Bauers job as the manager of the parlograph division of Carl Lindstrom were closer to middle class allies of Capital than to labor. Both jobs were built around offices. Kafkas letters contain so much material about his office that it provides a counterpart to the last story of his life, The Burrow, that mysterious and exhaustive confession of a beast digging a den. . The eternal return of the same motif pops out in the letter of October 27, 1912 Fr mich ist der Sonntag wenigstens seit 1 Monaten ein Wunder, dessen Schein ich schon Montag frh beim Aufwachen sehe. Das Problem bleibt, die Woche bis zum Sonntag hinzuschleppen, die Arbeit ber diese Wochentage hinzuziehn und wie ich es auch anstelle, Freitag geht es gewhnlich nicht mehr weiter. Wenn man so Stunde fr Stunde einer Woche verbringt, selbst bei Tag nicht viel weniger aufmerksam als der Schlaflose in der Nacht und wenn man sich so in der unerbittlichen Maschinerie einer solchen Woche umschaut, dann mu man wirklich noch froh sein, dass diese trostlos sich aufbauenden Tage nicht zurckfallen, um von neuem zu beginnen, sondern dass sie glatt vergehn und endlich zum Aufatmen der Abend und die Nacht beginnt.