Wild Strawberries

A certain amount of repression is necessary for growth. You can't think about all the people who have hurt or maimed you for life. Thd kind of shock the body goes into after physical trauma is an autonomic means if self-preservation guided by the biology and logic of survival. However, there's a certain point like the famous "zone" in running where one may have built up enough reserves to face the reality of the past. Your whole life may suddenly pass you by at this moment as a kind of preview of the famed retrospective that's supposed to occur around the time of the "death rattle." It's as if the color and texture that had been lost were suddenly restored--indeed in much the way art restorers find hidden canvases beneath the original. Remember that scene in Wild Strawberries when the professor, on his way to receiving an honorific drops, off at all the places of youthful folly where he'd made mistakes that can never be undone? That's exactly what it's like!

Listen to Francis Levy's playlist for The Kafka Studies Department on Largehearted Boy