A bunch of years ago I read a book of letters and short pieces by the writer Franz Kafka, and one of his reflections struck me hard at the time, in reference to how really great books affect us:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
(bold emphasis mine)
I thought about this axe for the frozen sea idea a lot, so much so that I talked about it on my old blog over a decade ago. I didn’t go into much detail about it the time, but I feel like it deserves my attention more than ever now.
Everyday Activities Dull Our Senses
Kafka’s frozen sea seems like a perfect way of summing up the Day Job world, which has us doing a lot of boring and repetitive tasks over and over. Kafka himself spent his entire life working in an insurance office while writing in his spare time, and his characters are often overcome by impossible work responsibilities. Like Kafka himself, we don’t go to our Day Jobs because they challenge us or help us discover new ideas, because if they did these things, they wouldn’t be Day Jobs.
Instead, we go to Day Jobs because they bring us material rewards that help us in other aspects of our lives—particularly the bill-paying, practical aspects that have to get done (feeding the animals, as a guest-poster recently wrote). We have to make (or at least pay for) dinner every night, pay our rent every month, fill out our tax forms every year, and clean our houses whenever. Maybe once upon a time these activities were challenging or interesting (the first time I did my own taxes I thought I was the master of the universe), but after a while they lose the excitement they once had and become, well…chores.
Chores aren’t exciting or interesting in any way—the word chore itself sounds like bore or boring, though it has a different origin. Sure the chores have to get done, but doing them doesn’t make us feel stimulated or enriched—it makes us feel, well, not very much at all.
Do enough chores, enough Day Job work, enough of anything that doesn’t sharpen your experience, and your own life will start to feel uninteresting, routine, and uninspired. This isn’t necessarily a painful process, but it does cut you off from actual experiences that make you feel things, whether those feelings are happiness, excitement, anger, sadness, jealousy, love, or fear.
Kafka’s frozen sea represents this life where you have a million things to do and none of them are particularly rewarding, so the majority of your time is spent on auto-pilot, cut off from the surging waves of existence. The sea of your life is frozen.
Really Good Art Breaks Us Out of Our Stupor
I think about all the great books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen and songs I’ve heard and plays I’ve been to and cool art museums I’ve visited, and each of these things meant a lot because they hooked me in a way that felt powerful and memorable. During these times, I felt things, and I also thought about things in a way that made my mind feel active and alive and engaged, and that’s not something that comes easily.
This kind of art is different than the “happy” kind Kafka talks about in the quote—you can think of that stuff as the junk food, the easily digestible art that doesn’t necessarily move you because you’re just kind of absorbing it. It’s the art that makes you feel good without leaving a lasting impact—or it’s the three-minute Youtube video you click on because you’ve got some time to kill before a dentist appointment.
In these cases, you need those things (books, movies, music, etc.) to jump-start your mind and break you out of the stupor caused by too much routine. You need the axe of powerful art to break apart the frozen sea of your daily life.
A good example is that scene in Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne plays the opera music over the prison loudspeakers. In the movie, the other prisoners aren’t exactly having an excruciating time, but their lives consist of a routine where they wake up, eat, do mindless prison work, go back to their cells, and go to sleep. The opera music helps break them out of that, so it feels all the more powerful.
In the real world, this stimulation looks a little different (opera, really???) because we find it in Stranger Things and comic book movies and cool indie music and Harry Potter and tabletop board games that may or may not have pictures of castles in them. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter what the axe looks like, as long as it pushes us beyond the boundaries of our routines.
Make Time for the Art That Matters to You
I try to make time every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes at the end of the night, to read or watch something I’m into. This not only keeps me connected to the creative work that matters to me, it also makes a good break after a hard day of doing the stuff I need to do. Most importantly, though, as Kafka would say, cool books and movies keep my mind moving and focused on what matters, in a way that matters, and keep me from drifting too far into the routine.
This is the biggest reason we need art that makes us think about things—because without it, the world is basically just a frozen sea of chores.
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