17 Jan 2023
Prague is the most medieval city of all the places I visited in Europe. We took the train from Vienna and arrived at night, the perfect time to wander through the Old Town Square.
As if time stands still in the Middle Ages. Frothy beer and golden mead, hearty stews served in bread bowls, the world’s best smoky sausages for breakfast, puppets peering from dim shop windows, music drifting from an accordion in the square, candies stacked like jewels, and, above all, the voices of Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka, authors I loved in my university days.
At its heart stood the Astronomical Clock, a mesmerizing masterpiece of time and cosmos. Built in 1410, it is the oldest working astronomical clock in the world, a masterpiece of time and cosmos.
Night was different. Under dim lanterns, the castel and bridge turned medieval again.
I visited the Kafka Museum alone; the boys hadn’t read any of his books, and I didn’t think it was worth paying for them to go. Outside the museum stands a strange sculpture—two bronze male figures facing each other, urinating into a basin shaped like the map of the Czech Republic. I noticed some tourists posing playfully with the statues, even using the genitals as props for photos. It wasn’t ironic or artistic to me, just something that felt uncomfortable.
The Kafka Museum itself is a place I would recommend, but only if you’re truly into Kafka. It’s dark, confusing, and not exactly friendly—just like Kafka himself.
“
When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even halfway serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely.
——— Franz Kafka Diary entry, January 3, 1912
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Half-awake, a thought slowly formed: what if The Metamorphosis is a metaphor for Alzheimer? When a person loses memory and recognition, when they are no longer “useful” or familiar, will their loved ones treat them the way Gregor was treated?
What makes human human? Is it the fragile threads of memory, identity, and connection. Strip them away, and what remains? Can love survive when memory doesn’t? Can dignity persist when usefulness vanishes?