Chapter 8: Books That Wake Us Up

The Words: Franz Kafka, 1904

On 27 January 1904, a twenty-year-old student named Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his school friend Oskar Pollak. He was thinking about what reading is for. In my own words, he writes that we should read only books that bite and sting us. If a book does not wake us up like a blow to the head, why read it? Books that only make us happy, he says, we could almost write ourselves. Then comes his famous image: a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Kafka is not asking for cruelty. He is asking for books strong enough to break through the ice of habit and make our feelings move again.

The Life Behind the Words

Kafka was born in 1883 and wrote in German. He studied law, and for most of his working life he had a steady office job at an institute that dealt with insurance for workers injured in accidents. He was careful and respected in his work. In the evenings and at night, he wrote. His stories are strange and dreamlike: a man wakes up one morning changed into a giant insect; another man is put on trial and never learns why. Many readers have found in them a deep picture of how lonely and confusing modern life can feel.

Kafka published only a few of his works in his lifetime. He became ill with tuberculosis, and he died in 1924, at the age of forty. He had asked his close friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished writings, but Brod could not bring himself to do it. Instead he published them, and Kafka became one of the most widely read writers of the century. The young man who wrote that a book should be an axe went on to write books that have been exactly that for many readers.

What the Words Ask of Us

Kafka's words ask us to read, and perhaps to live, with open eyes. There is nothing wrong with gentle and comforting books; we need them too. But Kafka reminds us that some reading should change us. Inside each of us, feelings and questions can freeze over. We stop noticing, we stop wondering, we stop caring about things that once mattered. A strong book, a true story or a good poem can crack that ice. Afterwards, we may feel more alive, more tender and more awake to other people's lives.

Think of Ivan, a sixteen-year-old who says he hates reading. A teacher hands him a novel about a boy of his own age who loses his home and has to start again. Ivan expects to be bored. Instead he reads it in two nights, and when he finishes, he sits very still. He finds himself thinking about a new student in his class whom he has ignored. The next day he says hello to him. The book was an axe, and something that had been frozen in Ivan began to move.

Similar Words From Around the World

In 1625, Francis Bacon, a writer and thinker who wrote in English, sorted books into kinds in his essay "Of Studies". In my own words: some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Bacon and Kafka agree that not all books do the same work. Bacon's echo adds a useful method. The most important books must be read slowly and thought over, the way food is chewed. The axe can break the ice only if we let it strike again and again, by returning to a book and letting it sink in.

Confucius, in the Analects (2.11), says that a person who reviews the old and finds something new in it is fit to be a teacher. This echo shows another side of Kafka's axe. Waking up does not always need a new book. Sometimes an old book, read again at a different age, strikes us in a completely new way. The ice may break not because the book has changed, but because we have. Confucius suggests that this kind of fresh seeing in familiar things is the beginning of wisdom.

Living It Today

Kafka's words can help readers of every kind. A busy worker can keep one serious book by the bed and read a few pages each night. A parent can read a story with a child and talk afterwards about what the characters felt. An older reader can return to a book loved in youth and see what it says now. Even people who do not read much can use the idea: a film, a piece of music, a conversation or a walk in a new place can also be the axe that wakes us.

This week, choose one book that you think may move you, not just entertain you. It might be a book someone has recommended many times, or one you put down long ago because it felt too difficult. Read it slowly, a little each day. When a sentence touches something in you, stop and stay with it for a moment. Let it do its work. The frozen sea inside us is never frozen forever, and a good book can remind us how warm and deep it really is.

Chapter 9: Youth Passes, the Dawn Remains

The Words: Rubén Darío, 1905

In 1905, the poet Rubén Darío published a book called Songs of Life and Hope. One of its best-loved poems is "Autumn Song in Spring". It begins with a cry that many readers of Spanish know by heart. In my own words: youth, divine treasure, you are leaving now, never to return. When I want to cry, I cannot, and sometimes I cry without wanting to. The poem then remembers the loves of his younger years, one by one, with tenderness and some sadness. But it does not end in sadness. In its last line, the poet says that the golden dawn is still his.

The Life Behind the Words

Rubén Darío was born in 1867 in Central America and wrote in Spanish. He was a poet from childhood, and as a boy he was already called "the child poet". As a young man he travelled widely, working as a journalist and later as a diplomat, and he lived in many cities in the Americas and in Europe. Everywhere he went, he read new poetry and listened for new music in language, and he brought these discoveries into his own poems.

Darío became the leading voice of a movement in Spanish-language poetry called modernismo, a Spanish word for modernism. It brought new rhythms, bright colours, music and a sense of wonder into verse, and poets across the Spanish-speaking world followed him. His life was not always calm: he often struggled with money and with his health. He was still in his late thirties when he wrote "Autumn Song in Spring", but he already felt that his youth had gone. He died in 1916, at the age of forty-nine.

What the Words Ask of Us

The poem's title holds a small puzzle: an autumn song in spring. By many measures the poet is still in the spring of life, but he already hears autumn coming. Many people feel this at some point. At thirty-eight, or fifty, or seventy, we look back and see that something bright has gone and will not return. Darío does not pretend otherwise. He lets himself grieve for his youth. And then, in one last line, he turns towards what remains: the golden dawn, the beginning of each new day, a light that belongs to every age.

Imagine Helen, who is seventy-four and finds an old photograph of herself at twenty, laughing by the sea. For a moment she feels a sharp sadness: that girl is gone. Then she goes to the window. It is early morning, and the sky is turning gold over the rooftops. She makes coffee, opens the window and listens to the birds. The girl in the photograph had her dawns, and Helen has this one. Reading Darío at twenty, we might hear only the sadness of the poem. Reading it at seventy, we may hear above all its last line.

Similar Words From Around the World

In the first century, the philosopher Seneca, writing in Latin, began his essay On the Shortness of Life (1.3–4) by questioning a common complaint. In my own words: it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, if it is used well. Seneca's echo adds a firm, practical note to Darío's tender poem. Youth may leave never to return, but the time we still have is not small. What matters is what we do with today's dawn.

Around the year 1000, Sei Shōnagon, a lady at a royal court in East Asia who wrote in Japanese, kept a book of notes and lists now called The Pillow Book. One list names things that simply keep passing by: a boat with its sail raised, people's age, spring, summer, autumn and winter. She does not weep over these things; she simply notes them, with clear eyes. Her echo shows another way of meeting the passing of youth. It is part of the natural movement of everything, like the seasons and a sailing boat. And just as the seasons return, so does each new dawn.

Living It Today

Darío's poem speaks to people at many stages of life. A young person can learn from it to enjoy youth without wasting it. Someone in middle age who feels that the best years are behind them can look for the golden dawn that is still theirs. An older reader may find comfort in the poet's honesty: it is all right to miss what has gone, as long as we do not miss what is here. Every age has its own dawns, and none of them comes twice.

Here is something to try this week. Get up once a little earlier than usual and watch the sky as the day begins, from a window, a balcony or a doorstep. Do nothing else for a few minutes. Just watch the light arrive. If you like, think of one thing from your younger years that you miss, and then of one thing about today that you would not want to lose. Like the poet, you may find that the golden dawn is still yours.