Franz Kafka and T. S. Eliot: quotes on stillness

"There is no need to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen.

Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone.

The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked,

it can't do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you."

Franz Kafka (On Sin, Suffering, and the True Way)

Here Kafka, a master of the inner metaphor, achieves a description of the effect which absolute stillness has upon our beings. This is the same point of reference which T.S. Eliot, in less emotional terms, describes as "The still point of the turning world", which is the unmoving yet living center from which we witness the true dynamic nature of created being; this still point is the place of receptive surrender, of complete concavity, from which one can ‘be with’ the living ‘createdness’ of being and thus experience the Creator creating.

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These excerpts are taken from unpublished chapters from

THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas