“Kafka’s Angel”

I came across this interesting essay, “Kafka’s Angel: The Distance of God in a Post-Traditional World,” in Janus Head.

In June 1914, Franz Kafka found himself overwhelmed by his life. Struggling person- ally, professionally, and artistically he sat one night to compose a story in his diary of a man confronted by the Divine. In this story, never published outside of his diary, Kafka sought to measure the distance between God and the individual in a post-traditional world. The result was the story of an aborted mystical experence in which Kafka defined the post-traditional existential experience in terms of failure. In so doing, Kafka also defined the post-modern existential condition in terms of the overwhelming distance the individual feels from God.

Read the whole thing here

There’s also a nice review of Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings