There is no room in it for that unoccupied and unused space beyond the sphere of human needs which we are in the habit of revering or enjoying as 'Nature'. In Kafka the absence of Nature is due to the fact that for him what might be termed the 'institutionalization' of the world is total, indeed totalitarian. Heidegger and Kafka are radically original in that aspect of their thought which does away with the natural and the supernatural at the same time. His position here resembles that of Heidegger, whose Existential philosophy represents an attack on Naturalism (while adopting its atheistic presuppositions) and therefore finds no place for nature as such, but only for the world in so far as the world exists 'for human existence', i.e., as 'material'. There may, however, be more modern reasons for the absence of this concept in Kafka's case. There is in a sense no 'Nature' in Genesis either, since the world is created for man. “If anything in Kafka's theology can be called Jewish, it is his virtual lack of any concept of 'Nature'. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.” (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn.
I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me.
That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. “Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.
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