I came to think a while ago that breeding an idle student life is so prejudicial. There is little good in students leading such student life, apart from myth and nonsense. The worst of them, those with less responsibilities. I like the suggestion that people working their asses hard to carry on family lives, to toil with any nasty drudgery that may fell upon them, or simply to deal with their daily grinds, have little time, if any, to think of flipping and messing with the establishment and, not at all, of course, to drop dead in the lap of fashion, snobbery or frivolity. The rich gangs of students at the universities of London, probably with nothing to squeeze their small brains about, spend the tax-payers' money occupying public buildings, assaulting private business and stores in the street and, even insulting the dead and flinging fire extinguisher from the roof of a few-yard-tall building in the streets (when not drinking, drugging up themselves, fucking to each other, literal or figuratively, I don't know, I don't know what they actually do, I am talking like an oldie...) . On the contrary, the busy people minding their own business and assuming the obligations tend, at most, to feed art and humanity (http://www.goear.com/listen/113c04d/that-lucky-old-sun).
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I perceive that people talk too much on the phone. Mobiles, cells, whatever you wanna call them, all day long. I overheard a guy in the department today explain joyfully how he finally had found an explanation for the bad measurements he was taken (eavesdropping is easy for me without lose attention on what I am doing). Apparently, the mobile phones around induce a certain distortion on the electrical/magnetic signals of the device he uses to take measurements.
You are in the bus and it is so common the scene of folks fingering their cells, now scrolling their little screens up and down, then pressing buttons or playing, later talking to somebody, normally small-talking to somebody and taking the right precautions -'cause I don't believe it is unnoticed for them- to be overhead by everyone. The same scenes are in the pubs, in the line inside a coffeeshop, waiting for the train, inside any store, anywhere _it is like a pandemia of fashioness and addictive necessity. Even in a restaurant, you see so often two people talking to each other. If one goes to the restroom, the other seizes the moment to check on his phone. Furthermore, sometimes both stop talking and check their phones, until the bill is ready and they are free to go.
It comes so handy that routine of the stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in a time where cell phones were yet a long way to become public and widespread, speaking about, if I am not wrong, the voice message in answer machines: "Come on! Relax, you have to give people a chance to miss you a litleeeeeee".
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I will finish as soon as I complete my writing tonight here Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, I don't read German, and I am a little discourage to get myself to it, first because I really am not determined and, second, because I am not sure if I could read the needed German in a reasonable amount of time. I mean, though I can read as fast as in Spanish, the good English takes me the best in matters of vocabulary, so I wouldn't be surprise to go crazy with German.
I never tried Metamorphosis in Spanish, don't know why, probably because the translation that I had on made the story funny. Do you know what I mean? Traduttore, traditore! There are things that you cannot translate. I imagine that if literature could be treated formally in a general way, it wouldn't be hard to demonstrate beyond any doubt that translation is not always possible without making the writer a fool, and the reader a childish, deceived poor guy, missing out everything.
Despite not enjoying myself the writing -as I did indeed with The Wind in the Willows-, the story is powerful and keeps me surprising as I turn page after page. I actually can't wait to see the end! But it is a dark story, quite painful _the agony of Gregor's family, mainly his mother's breaks my heart. For Gregor, it must be an unbearable feeling the vanishing of his life as he knew it and, probably, liked _First, his identity goes away, then his work and value for others as head of the family, later the love, care, consideration and even recognition of his own home and house. His most beloved objects and memories, all gone. At the end, he is just a mere object sitting in a forgotten, secret room along with toss-away paraphernalia until, I am afraid, I guess (I haven't finished it yet), his life will be taken. The hinge on which the fate of Gregor turns and depends upon, after he became an animal, is his sister: she demands to spare his life, she demands to dispose of it.
What do we mean by kafkanian scenes? I tend to read novels more in an abstract way, so I lose perceivable images. However, the whole story is full of tremendous images. I can see, as an example, Gregor's father in a rage attempting to murder him at the end of the 2nd part, hurling red apples against him, the mother in shock and in underwear, the sister crying and placating the furious man. Finally, (no-more)Gregor, in an empty room, being a crawling, hideous cockroach clang to the wall, motionless, dusty and hopeless.
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