July 3, 1883

The Jew from Prague by Ernst Pawel is subtitled The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. We quote from a 2014 review:

The book is particularly engaging when it introduces Kafka’s circle of intimates, and also when explaining the nature of his work over the years at the Prague branch of a large insurance company. Hypercritical of himself as a writer (he consigned many manuscripts to the flames during his lifetime and asked that the rest be burned after his death), Kafka appears to have been an exemplary employee, taking occasional satisfaction from a job well done. The biography also softens the image of Kafka as a neurotic recluse by offering a fuller record than we have so far had of both his casual and his serious involvements with women. It seems clear that toward the end of his life he was able to form deep and mature attachments to Milena Jesenská and to the nineteen-year-old Dora Diamant, the daughter of a Polish hasidic household whom he met in a sanatorium and with whom he shared his last, probably happiest year.


The writing of Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 to June 3, 1924) is often held to shed a particular light on the nature of modernity.  But not a steady light. From the text we notice that 

Interestingly Kafka writes to his friend that he (Kafka) is frightened of mice, and that it is a matter for "a pschoanalyst and I don't happen to be one."

An episode dated I believe to 1917 describes "...an infestation of mice sent him into hysterics and made it impossible for him to sleep or work in his room until he learned to keep a cat, a cure that struck him as scarcely preferable to the disease."