Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 11, 1993 TAG: 9303110077
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
KAFKA DIDN'T EXPECT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY
Q: Why did Kafka want all his writings burned after his death?A: We expect literary geniuses to be eccentric. We expect them to be tormented, emotionally fragile, tubercular when at all possible. Literary geniuses are not supposed to be well-adjusted suburbanites who mow their own yards and tinker in the basement on their Black & Decker Workmate.
So one of the things that has cemented Kafka's literary reputation is his request that his writings be burned after his death. But he probably didn't mean it. It is significant that he gave the instructions to Max Brod, his friend and greatest fan.
"He was well aware that Brod would be the one man who would never burn his manuscripts," says Ernst Pawel, author of the Kafka biography "The Nightmare of Reason."
So why'd Kafka even make the request? One is tempted to argue that Kafka was merely posturing, that he was intentionally trying to be perceived as bizarre and self-loathing and avant-garde. Pawel argues that Kafka was just being ambivalent about himself, as always. This was a man who could never finish a novel and was constantly changing his mind about getting married.
"He wanted them destroyed, but he didn't want them destroyed," says Pawel. "He never could make up his mind, and he suffered from that. He always saw not two sides of every question but five sides."
Was he as weird as people think? Probably not.
"He was neurotic but not all that strange," says Pawel. "He was a very regular guy with a great sense of humor."
He looks like an assassin in most photographs but was in fact a rather handsome chap, tall for that period, and he held down a good job as an insurance executive. Right, an insurance executive. He was the man in gray flannel suit. Some day we'll find out he could drive a golf ball farther than John Daly.
Q: Why doesn't the heart muscle get tired the way other muscles do?
A: You would think that the heart would get tired from all that thudding. Even when you sleep, the heart keeps pounding, never gets a breather, never gets to just shut down for a few minutes, never gets to signal for the backup system to take over. The heart does its job so peacefully that you usually can't feel it. Even if you climb some stairs, your thigh muscles will get tired before your heart does.
Is your heart made out of some kind of super-strong muscle?
Yeah, actually. Cardiac muscle is different from skeletal muscle. The mitochondria - the little engines within a cell that convert food to energy - comprise 30 to 35 percent of the volume of the cells of heart muscle. In skeletal muscle the mitochondria take up only one or two percent of the volume. The result is that your heart muscle doesn't get taxed as easily.
"In a regular cell when the supplies are used up, then at some point fatigue sets in because the mitochondria in the cell can't keep up with the energy demands, whereas in a heart cell there's no problem doing that because of the huge volume of mitochondria," says Larry Stephenson, a heart surgeon and professor at Wayne State University.
Second, heart muscle contracts differently. This gets rather technical and boring - and by the standards of this column that is saying something - and so we will summarize the situation by saying that the little fibers of heart muscle contract more slowly than skeletal muscle, less frantically. Your heart keeps a nice, smooth beat. (For now.)
Q: Why is the Oval Office oval?
A: Rex Scouten, curator of the White House, says the original house had three oval rooms, and most of the presidents during the 1800s used the oval room on the second floor as their office. When Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing of the White House in 1902 he set himself up in a normal, rectangular office, nothing too fancy.
But that got to be a problem, since so much of what the president does is ceremonial, and Roosevelt kept having to troop over to the more formal main building to shake hands with ambassadors and war heroes and so forth. So when William Howard Taft enlarged the West Wing a few years later he made the president's office oval, so it would seem more White House-ish.
(Funny how no one cares that William Howard Taft used three names, but if the president's wife wants to be Hillary Rodham Clinton it's an act of unspeakable arrogance.) Washington Post Writers Group