“If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.Some context: this quote – now endlessly circulating the drain of the internet – originates from Kafka’s 1904 letter to friend Oskar Pollak. Pollak was a fellow student at Charles University. His specialty was Baroque art & architecture (Kafka was learning law). By this time Kafka would have known him for about 4 or 5 years. And the letter would have originally been in German, obviously. Ein Buch muss die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.