blantland

In this scene from Berserk, Guts's reflection on the ground isn't just a visual choice… it's an image of self-erasure. He sees himself as a nearly lifeless body, with no one to help him, in a world drained of meaning and comfort.

And yet, at the exact point where everything seems to signal the end, a small but decisive gesture happens: Guts gets up. Not out of hope. Not from some radiant conviction. Something more primal and hollow drives him. He doesn't want to die… or, more radically, he doesn't know how to do anything but keep living. That almost automatic motion gives birth to a way of being where survival is no longer a choice, but momentum.

This is where the core of his identity forms: not as a hero of victory, but as someone forged by trauma, marked by abandonment and the absence of protection. Living stops being a promise and becomes resistance against a hostile world. In that gesture, his "iron will" is born; not as something epic, but as the sheer inability to give up, even without a reason to go on.

Kentaro Miura builds this scene by stripping it of all grandiosity. No speech. No heroic climax. No instant redemption. Just a broken body that, against all logic, decides to keep moving. And in that silent decision lies one of the deepest threads of the work: the persistence of life even after it has lost its footing.

𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐞 Berserk • ベルセルク (1997) 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Kentaro Miura 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨 OLM, Inc. 𝐝𝐢𝐫. Naohito Takahashi 𝐜𝐡𝐫. 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐞𝐫 Norihiro Matsubara, Yoshihiko Umakoshi

Dr. Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday in the Kierling Sanatorium, near Klosterneuburg bei Wien. Few people knew him here, for he was a recluse, a wise man in dread of life. He had been suffering a lung disease for years, and although he worked to cure it, he also consciously nourished it, and fostered it in his thoughts. He once wrote in a letter: when heart and soul can’t bear it any longer, the lung takes on half the burden, so that it is distributed a little more evenly-and that’s the way it was with his disease. It lent him an almost miraculous tenderness and an almost horribly uncompromising intellectual refinement. 

Physically, however, Franz Kafka loaded his entire intellectual fear of life onto the shoulders of his disease. He was shy, anxious, meek, and kind, yet the books he wrote are gruesome and painful. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, tearing apart and destroying defenseless humans. He was too clairvoyant, too intelligent to be capable of living, and too weak to fight. He was weak the way noble, beautiful people are, people incapable of struggling against their fear of misunderstanding, malice, or intellectual deceit because they recognize their own helplessness in advance; their submission only shames the victor. He understood people as only someone of great and nervous sensitivity can, someone who is alone, someone who can recognize others in a flash, almost like a prophet. His knowledge of the world was extraordinary and deep; he was himself an extraordinary and deep world.

He has written the most significant books of modern German literature, books that embody the struggle of today’s generation throughout the world-while refraining from all tenderness. They are true, stark, and painful, to the point of being naturalistic even where they are symbolic. They are full of dry scorn and the sensitive perspective of a man who saw the world so clearly that he couldn’t bear it, a man who was bound to die since he refused to make concessions or take refuge, as others do, in various fallacies of reason, or the unconscious-even the more noble ones. 

Dr. Franz Kafka wrote “The Stoker”, the first chapter of a wonderful, still unpublished novel (which has appeared in Czech in Neumann’s Červen); “The Judgement,” the conflict of two generations; “The Metamorphosis,” the most powerful book in modern German letters; “In the Penal Colony”; and the collections Meditation and A Country Doctor. The last novel, Before the Law (The Trial), has been in manuscript form, ready to print, for years. It is one of those books which, upon reading, leaves the impression of a world so perfectly portrayed that any further comment is superfluous. All of his books paint the horror of secret misunderstandings, of innocent guilt between people. He was an artist and a man of such anxious conscience he could hear even where others, deaf, felt themselves secure.

paolo veronese, the triumph of virtue over vice, c. 1554-6