#cf.prose

he attended a conférence in the Rudolfinum on the subject of La Légende de Napoléon, at which one Richepin, a sturdy man of fifty with a fine figure, his hair arranged in stiff whorls in the Daudet style and at the same time lying close to his scalp, said among other things that in the past Napoleon’s tomb used to be opened once a year so that old soldiers filing past could set eyes on their embalmed Emperor. But later the custom of the annual opening of the tomb was discontinued, because his face was becoming rather green and bloated. Richepin himself as a child, however, says Kafka, had seen the dead Emperor in the arms of his great-uncle, who had served in Africa and for whom the commandant had the tomb specially opened. Moreover, Kafka’s diary entry continues, the conférence concluded with the speaker swearing that even in a thousand years’ time every mote of the dust of his own corpse, should it have consciousness, would still be ready to follow the call of Napoleon.

A fear of death. ..Even if I hanged myself I would still not experience bliss. ..It seemed all so perfect before: contingency would be abolished, it was the dream of the perfect death. A garden of delight." - "We cannot remake ourselves through memory"

life ..made sense from things ..found in gift shops.

his real life-and this is the stuff that stories are made of-first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end-unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it-suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story. ..Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back.