Will Self at Kafka’s Wound
Or is it only that every generation manufactures the Kafka they want, and while in the middle of the last century, the Kafka whose minatory tales foreshadowed the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism was, in contemporary governmental-business jargon, fit for purpose, now we require another kind of Kafka altogether? The constant here, surely, is irony.
25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English
Litost (Czech): a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery
Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan): A look between two people that suggests an unspoken, shared desire
Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods
Yoko meshi (Japanese): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language
In a Brown Study 