Kafka's Hat by Patrice Martin

Author:Patrice Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

Max has been looking at the river for about ten minutes. It is not yet 6:00 a.m. and the fog, thinner than usual, floats above the glacial waters of the St. Lawrence. Standing a few feet from the road, he pulls his hat down to shield himself from the wind coming off the river. He smokes a cigarette, his left hand in his pocket. The blinkers of his car, abandoned on the side of the road, beat like a mechanical heart in the half-light of dawn.

He is frowning so intently, he looks as if he were searching for something. But he is not. He thinks about the river. He comes this way every day, but has never stopped to look at the river before. He tells himself that it is stupid. Tourists from all over spend huge amounts of money to come here and go whale-watching while he, who lives practically around the corner, never bothers to glance at it. Max likes irony, so, as he finishes the cigarette he usually smokes in the car, he smiles from the corner of his mouth.

He wonders whether the same is true elsewhere in the world. Do people who live close to extraordinary sites (the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, magnificent beaches or mountains …) ignore those wonders the same way he has been ignoring his river for fifty-five years? He thinks for a few seconds and realizes that this is nonsense. A site that is part of a man’s day-to-day reality – a familiar site – no matter how magnificent, is by definition ordinary. What would be extraordinary for someone in Pisa, for example, would be to wake up one morning and see his tower gone. The river is simply part of his reality.

This thought comforts him, because he doesn’t like the idea of being abnormal. Different, yes. Abnormal, no. He has his habits, his routine, his preferences and believes wholeheartedly that a certain humanistic logic guides his choices. In college, he studied more than just public administration and accounting. He read the “classics,” particularly philosophy and literature. He got involved in student politics. He fought for a better world. Even if he would not go so far as to describe himself as predictable, which would be pejorative, he sees himself as reasonably coherent. There.

That said, the question remains: is it normal to ignore the beauty of one’s own reality simply because one is exposed to it on a daily basis? Applied to other spheres of life, this rule about the consequence of everyday life on our perception of reality is unbearable. If repeated contact with a given reality prevents us from perceiving its beauty, is the same true about love or friendship? Can we love only what is far away? Max finds this idea peculiar; for him, it is perfectly reasonable to “discover” something that has been right under one’s nose but, for all kinds of reasons, one never fully appreciated.

In London, for example,

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