Kafka’s Short Piece: A Hyper-Sensitive World

Franz Kafka was the textbook definition of a highly sensitive person. His world was tiny: the smallest incident could hijack his senses and fill his mind. But his world was also vast: at any moment he could be overwhelmed by details and flooded with relentless thoughts.

“The Resolution” — When a too-sensitive sense of duty turns you into a master of half-hearted socializing

Kafka wants to respond to every feeling, every person, just right.
If A happens to drop by, I’ll greet him with overflowing warmth.
If B is sitting in my room, I’ll put up with him kindly and patiently.
If I’m talking with C, no matter how much I’m suffering inside, I’ll swallow everything he says in one big, painful gulp.

And yet, even if I manage to do all of this, one tiny misstep — something I simply can’t control — is enough to bring everything crashing down: the easy parts and the hard parts alike. Then I have no choice but to retreat back into myself.

So the best strategy, he concludes, is just to endure it all: to be the kind of person who seems hard to approach, to drift with the current, to refuse to act on every temptation, to stop doing unnecessary things. Just look straight at people, blankly if you have to, and try not to drown in regret.

This state of mind is summed up in one small, telling gesture: running the little finger lightly across the eyebrow.

Virginia Woolf also wrote about the misery of social life:

At that party, when I never knew what to say next, and the conversation kept collapsing into those awful silences — silences so exposed and obvious they felt like every pebble in a dried-up riverbed, sharp and separate — and then I blurted out things I absolutely shouldn’t have said, convinced I was being brutally, almost painfully honest, the sort of honesty you’d gladly trade for a handful of bright, glittering coins, if only you could… oh, how disheartening it all was at a party like that! How unbearably humiliating!

If only Woolf had learned Kafka’s trick of “running your little finger over your eyebrow,” maybe those evenings wouldn’t have felt quite so excruciating.

“A Sudden Walk” — For a Highly Sensitive Person, Stepping Outside Feels Like Running Away

After dinner, the air at home slowly thickens, as if the room itself has settled on a plan.
Evening comes, and if someone has more or less decided to stay in, they change into their comfy clothes, sit at the bright kitchen table, find something harmless to do before bed.
If the weather outside is awful, the kind that kills any desire to go out.
If they’ve been sitting there so long that their sudden disappearance is bound to draw attention.
If the stairwell is already dark and the front door has been locked for the night—

Then breaking this inertia is like smashing a glass: sharp, abrupt, guaranteed to cause a stir.
Even if they know the commotion is coming and still go through with it, for them it already feels wildly rebellious. And that rebellious spark is enough to blur the heavy atmosphere of home, to make it lose its pressure.

Now imagine that, all at once, without caring about any of that, they stand up with a sudden uneasy energy, change out of their loungewear, quickly get dressed to go out, announce that they “just need some air,” toss out a casual goodbye and actually leave. They know perfectly well that depending on how softly or sharply the door closes, there will be more or less anger left swirling behind them.

But once they turn into the street, they feel their spirits rise again; their limbs suddenly light and agile, as if this unexpected freedom has rewired their whole body.
They sense that in this one decision, every bit of their power to decide has gathered itself. They realize, with a kind of secret satisfaction, that they have more strength than they ever ask of themselves — enough to change the situation quickly and easily, and enough to endure whatever that change brings.

If they just keep walking down the street like that, then for this one evening, they have truly walked out of their home.
The house fades, losing its outlines, gradually disappearing in the background; and the person walking grows more solid, more defined. They slap their thighs lightly, straighten up, and feel that for the first time in a long while, they have stepped back into being themselves.

Kafka not only wrote short stories about walking out like this; he also wrote about it in his diary. That walk, taken under the weight of his father’s anger, left him exhilarated:

For this one night, you completely stepped out of your family.
Something other people can’t fully achieve, even by traveling to the farthest places.

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“Clothes” — His Observations Are Naturally a Little Cruel

For girls, makeup is a mask; their social persona is just another outfit.
The moment the exhaustion and puffiness underneath show through, the mask stops working.

When I see beautiful bodies wrapped in dresses full of pleats, lace and frills, I often think: these clothes won’t stay lovely for long.
They’ll wrinkle, and never quite iron flat again.
They’ll catch dust, the dust will settle deep into the folds and never fully come out.
I think: who would willingly put on the same precious dress every morning, take it off every night, and make themselves look that hopelessly sad and absurd?

But then I see some women who are genuinely beautiful — all those expressive muscles and bones, the springy skin, the hair like a soft cloud. Day after day they wear this one inborn outfit, this natural costume of theirs.
They keep slipping the same face into the same pair of hands, looking at the same features in the same mirror, over and over and over.

Only every now and then, late at night, when they come home from a party, the face in the mirror looks tired, swollen, dusted over — and everyone has already seen it like that. At that point, this mask of a face is no longer so easy to wear.