My sister sent us some photographs that she took with her camera while we were visiting Singapore, and while they are all wonderful this one is my favorite, mostly because it makes me look like some kind of off-duty circus acrobat with freakishly long arms. Also, it captures me doing one of the things I love best in the whole wide world:

Wearing my Keens. Man, I love those things. When I’ve got them on I feel like I can go anywhere! Do anything! Squish into as much mud and iguana poop as necessary in order to retrieve bamboo! Yeah.

Upon attending my second Kafka class it became apparent that my teacher is not only terrifically smart and an excellent lecturer, she’s also incredibly dictatorial and a little bit more fond of the sound of her own voice than everyone else’s. Just a little. So far I don’t mind much, since what she has to say is more interesting than what anyone else has to say, and also I know better than to do anything that would invite her wrath (she has scolded people for whispering and cut them off sharply and imperiously for disagreeing with her on points of fact). Also, it is tremendously funny to watch a classroom full of adults shift in their seats and look down at their feet like chastised kindergarteners.

Even if I had been annoyed with her all would have been forgiven the moment we read this piece, close to the end of class this Wednesday, and she interrupted our bemused ponderings by producing a luminous reading of it (not hers, but “the one that comes closest to my own interpretation”) that transformed the character of the words so beautifully and appropriately, for me, anyway (I don’t know about you and everybody else), that I almost laughed out loud with sheer joy. Here is the piece:

The Trees

For we are like the trunks of trees in the snow. Apparently they rest smoothly on the surface and with a gentle push we should be able to shift them. No, that one cannot, for they are firmly attached to the ground. But see, that too is only apparent.

We had been talking about Kafka’s sense of what it is to be human, his somewhat dysfunctional personality, his desire to be in physical contact with other people and yet what seemed like his inability to make deep and intimate connections with them. We all stared at the words on the page, mulling over what it could possibly mean for people to be like the trunks of trees, seemingly movable, then seemingly immovable, then—perhaps—movable again.

And then, lightly, cheerfully, there came this comment from the head of the table:

“Many readers have argued that the we in the first sentence is not a human we, but a we that refers to the letters themselves; sharp, black, angular letters against snow white paper, straight and firm as trees.”

And as soon as she said the word letters I could feel my heart expand and my lips move into a smile and my mind fly, not because the image of tree trunks in the snow is the perfect way to talk about language, but because how many times have I myself had that odd experience of having my relationship to a piece of literature changed once, twice, three times: coming upon a set of words fresh as a flower and feeling sure I know exactly how to read them, what meaning they hold, how they will unfold for me so willingly and perfectly; then becoming frustrated, finding the words stubborn and unyielding, as if their meaning is buried deep beneath and will not be budged; then, knowing that not to be true, trying again to shift them so that they glide for me, spill their secrets, dance across the page into the sense I know they were destined to make? Why, it was happening now! It was happening right at that moment, and so smoothly and unexpectedly it was as if I myself had roots that were shifting so that I could smoothly slide across the snow.

What I love about Kafka is not that he creates images that seem so familiar and right to me that they might be elemental. I love other people for that: Bukowski and Carver and Amichai, and others. What I love about Kafka is how he creates images that tug at me in a baffling way until I realize (if I am lucky, anyway) that they describe a sideways, off-kilter experience I have had many times, but would never have even known how to think about if I hadn’t first come across that utterly bizarre, baffling image. He turns everything inside out and I have to turn it back again, but it’s like wrestling with a dream, slippery and there is always the threat of waking.