3 posts tagged with "Kafkaesque Absurdity"

The legend of Anai did not begin with any specific event, but rather permeated the city air like a whisper, an unsettling consensus. She was a deaf-mute girl, a fact that might ordinarily elicit only pity or indifference. However, Anai possessed an unsettling, almost absolute perfection of features. This perfection was not beauty in the conventional sense, but a kind of harmony that transcended human aesthetic experience, as if it were a fragile, fleeting projection of "Beauty itself" from Plato's world of Forms.

It was in the vast, sea-like archives of the Port Authority that I first noticed the ninety ships. Not because of their number—countless vessels ply the Pacific—but because of an almost perfect, unsettling symmetry. They numbered exactly ninety, no more, no less, forever maintaining this count like fixed pieces on a chessboard, traversing nearly identical routes from some colossal port in the East towards the distant West Coast of America. Then, with hardly a delay, they returned along another precisely calculated, slightly different course. Day after day, year after year.

Spring in Beiping, the wind still so unruly, swirling willow catkins and dust, finding its way straight down your collar. The Ma family's old window, patched with layers of paper, still couldn't block that strange 'whuuu whuuu' moan. Inside, though, it was nothing like the weather outside – stiflingly hot, like freshly steamed buns.