Time Turned Its Back on Me

We are all casualties of the mechanistic and militant advancement of purely linear conceptualizations of time. Franz Kafka articulates this sense of alienation and the impact of disembodied time upon all things (words, things, people, actions) as they loose their meaning in his stories. In a letter to his sister he wrote: “In fact the clock has certain personal relationships to me, like many things in the room, save that now… they seem to be beginning to turn their backs on me, above all the calendar… Lately it is as if it had been metamorphosed. Either it is absolutely uncommunicative- for example, you want its advice, you go up to it, but the only thing it says is ‘Feast of the Reformation’- which probably has a deeper significance, but who can discover it –or, on the contrary, it is nastily ironic.”