“I was in great difficulty,” begins Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor.” “An urgent journey was facing me. A seriously ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant.” Things get worse from there. The protagonist can’t find a horse. His patient has no discernible wound but is dying. There’s a terrible snow storm outside. “‘Will you save me?’ whispers the young man, sobbing, quite blinded by the life inside his wound. That’s how people are in my region. Always demanding the impossible from the doctor.”

We talked about this story near Kafka’s grave. Kafka lived his entire life in Prague. He wrote at night, worked as an insurance clerk during the day, lived with his parents, and suffered. We talked about the effect of paralysis in his writing. Of wanting to do something–needing to do something–but the nightmarish experience of helplessness. “A Country Doctor” demonstrates this brilliant and mad experience. We read it, visited his grave, and wrote about death. Kafka would be proud.