Finding faith in kafka

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

i gotta say, franz kafka is one of my favorite writers of all time... and the above passage might be the best opening line in any work of fiction i've ever read. for whenever i'm down, feelin' blue, or just not havin' a good day, i can turn to the works of kafka (mostly extrapolations of his very own life) and realize i'm not nearly as fucked up as i  once thought i was.

from what i can tell, kafka was a closet atheist. one couldn't be open about it back then like you can today. he seemed to use the language of the church to point out its downfalls while still maintaining some semblance of piety... to look good, y'know.

of course, i'm just guessing on this... maybe he was one of the crazies... but in the meantime, i will continue to find some morbid sense of atheistic peace in his writings.

if nothing else, the dude had balls. he wrote an entire novella about life in america having never been to america and his manuscript is so full of holes that any person who had ever been to america would immediately know he was absolutely full of shit.

but he didn't care.

and i respect that.