Franz Kafka- The Metamorphsis

What a great read. I think I have not been impressed thus far since "The Outsider" and that is one tough cookie to live up to. "The Metamorphsis" has left me with many thoughts and bugging questions and suspicions.

Gregory suffers from Alienation. And this alienation is multifarious in its dimensions. Firstly, he is alienated from himself. He has become something that he does not quite recognize. Even if he had not changed into a cockroach, he was already at a point of "non-self-recognition". He is alienated by who he is (who he has to be) from who he is and was. Secondly, Gregory is alienated from his family. Similarly, his biological metamorphsis only serves to highlight the fact that they had developed a complacency towards his generosity and had effectively typecast him as just the provider. Lastly, he is alienated from humanity due to the nature of his work which makes his never stay long enough anywhere to be of any impression and permanence. In effect, his travelling salesman occupation renders his existence among any community a nature of fleeting weightlessness.

Of course, the text is peppered with absurdity as well which always underlines such thought-provoking plots. But it is all true. The absurdity of pressing concerns/ practicalities still remains even though Gregory has had the worst happen to him. As a flailing cockroach which is struggling to understand and discover his biomechanics, he still has to contend with a supervisor which actually makes a house visit on account of him being late. Everyone suffers from wrong priorities in that particular part of the story and this really highlights how perceived importance triumphs over real importance.

Absurdity rears its ugly face once again later in the story when the "normalcy of the unusual" strikes. The family members show us that humans are all but creatures of habit and memory. We can get used to suffering. Is it too tiring to go on mourning forever? Is this a self-defense mechanism? Gregory's plight (which is highly unusual!) becomes normal in due time. Habit and memories then snuff all meaning out of his suffering till he feels himself redundant and guilty of being a burden. And that is when he goes through his last phase of the metamorphsis and becomes null.

Read this with the knowledge that for now this is just my interpretation of the text and I have not studied any prior analysis of it as of yet. I am sure once I have that I will be back eagerly to develop on this text more. :)

Miraculous coincidences

Can you imagine when the universe was not yet in existence? When it was suspended in imaginary time.

If you think about how things come to be and the myriad of miraculous coincidences that have propelled or rather brought us to where we are now.

The fact that I can write this blog post. The fact that I can apply my cognitive reasoning. The fact that the atoms on my laptop are holding up with the strength of its bonds and not disintegrating. The fact that the moon is high in the sky and regulating the earth's waves.

And then I think about us. About our meat vessels, about our consciousness and witness-consciousness and how at our core, we are but a highly complex system of atomic systems. How at essence, we are integrating as a system of atomic systems with other atomic systems. How we must leave energy residues and parts of ourselves with everything that we interact with.

Our lives and all we hold dear are miraculous coincidences. Let us begin at the beginning or rather the point of non-being.

Imagine all (or rather the lack of all) before the "Big Bang", when all that was to be was suspended in imaginary time.

And then the universe expanded out into time and space as a hot, glowing fireball and rapidly cooled while it expanded. Protogalaxies contracted and began to break into fragments. Gravity then caused the fragments to contract even more and to become very hot as they compressed. Nuclear fusion then began within their cores.

Our solar system begins its birth dance as the cloud of interstellar gas and dust condenses. As the cloud collapsed, a dense, slowly rotating core was formed. This would become the sun.

Our nascent earth experienced numerous collisions with asteroids. This produced so much energy that our earth formed a molten core that was composed mostly of iron. the lighter elements then floated to the surface and created our rocky mantle. Our early earth's surface was molten, it had no solid surface.

The atmosphere consisted mainly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. photosynthesizing bacteria were not present as of yet. We had no oceans either. Most of the water that is present on the earth;s surface was released from the mantle in volcanic eruptions and had come originally from collisions with comets ("dirty ice balls").

Our surface cooled enough for the oceans to form and created a hospitable environment. Amino acids, on the tails of comets that brushed the earth's atmosphere, blessed us with the building blocks from which proteins are formed.

Amino acids and the other organic chemicals were present in the primordial oceans only in small quantities. Darwin suggested a highly likely warm pond where chemical evolution took place. RNA (the primitive form of DNA) then could form. The first living organisms were primitive algae and bacteria.

It then took 3 billion years for multicellular life forms to evolve on earth.