Expert in the art of entangling the everyday with the nightmarish, the work of the Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) continues to have overwhelming validity for what it says and how it does it. What did he mean with his phrase «whoever retains this beautiful capacity never ages«.
Knowing that youth, beyond biological age, is a mental concept, Kafka He addressed the topic of age and how one feels in several of his writings.. He repeatedly used the idea of growing old as a metaphor for the renunciation of imagination or the loss of inner freedom.
The link between imagination and old age according to Kafka
For the author, there were young people who feel old and old people who feel young, a way of feeling and perceiving themselves beyond age. This idea is related to beautywhich for the Czech was not something superficial, but an idea that connected with the vitality of the spirit and wonder.
The phrase «he who retains this beautiful capacity never ages» is attributed to the conversations he had with his friend Gustav Janouch (wrote the book «Conversations with Kafka: notes and memories«).
Despite his characteristic melancholy, Kafka saw life as something splendid and giving the chance to reveal beauty. We see beauty everywhere, if we are willing to see it.. Kafka associated youth with perception and not age, and the beauty of life had to do with this idea.
Kafka narrated impossible events with a unique coldness, without embellishment: horror was accepted as something normal. For this, the idea of preserving youth, even if only in perception, is important to the author.
The author avoided sentimentality in his writings, with clean language, which made the absurdity of the plot shocking. He did not like to write about distant worlds, but about the anguish that human beings can suffer in everyday lifetrapped in systems from which he cannot escape.
Metamorphosis and hope against the passage of time
His life was short, died at 40 years old due to tuberculosis, a disease from which he began to suffer in 1917 and suffered for seven years. This marked him, finding himself alienated and inspired to tell how human beings can feel strange in their own environment.
Then, the author of the famous work The Metamorphosisoriginally published in 1915, could see feeling young, seeking the imagination and light that makes you feel that way, as a way to confront aging… that metamorphosis that the passage of time in our body proposes to us.
In his dialogues with Janouch, Kafka deepened the idea that life, despite everything, is a gift if you know how to look: «It is as splendid as it is, because it is a revelation of beauty. It has no other object than that«he assured.
His outlook, ultimately, was neither defeatist nor pessimistic. In The Metamorphosis he gives reflection that indicates that even «we have not been defeated by the world«, being a halo of hope in the face of the difficult path we have to live.
