Tag: books

The Lake of Honey

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Lara was aware she was doomscrolling. Part of her wanted to throw her phone away, but she couldn’t stop watching those short videos that were made to grab her attention and keep her wanting more. Her eyes were stuck to the screen, and her thumb was programmed to ceaselessly swipe up. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she wanted to cry. “Why can’t I do anything about it?”

It was 1:04 AM. She was in her spacious, fashionably furnished bedroom, sunk in a plush velvet sofa by the window. The sheer alabaster linen curtains were open, allowing the moonlight to invade her bedroom unimpeded. Everything in the bedroom seemed to be in its rightful place, except her. She was lying on the sofa when she should have been in bed, sleeping, dreaming, resting.

The more she scrolled, the angrier she became at herself, but every video postponed that anger another minute. Every last video she planned to watch was followed by another video, each more unfulfilling than the last. She kept wanting to watch one more, and she did. She scrolled.

Then, in the split second between the video she had just watched and the video she was about to watch, she imagined herself drowning in a lake of honey. The new video started playing, but her attention had now turned inward, and she saw herself sinking deeper into honey, and she wondered whether she could swim in honey if she were ever thrown in such a lake. She then thought, “Are the videos I’m watching supposed to be the honey I’m drowning in? I’m more like a fly stuck to a sticky flypaper.” But that thought was short-lived. She started imagining pulling herself out of the lake thanks to a rope that a good-looking stranger threw her way. The stranger looked like he was in his mid-twenties, five or so years younger than her. He was a muscular man with broad shoulders, wearing only swimming shorts. Thick veins ran down from his biceps and forearms and disappeared only when they reached his wrists. His whole body shone in the moonlight. And in that darkness, he was like the light a dying person saw at the end of the tunnel. Lara held on to the rope he threw and pulled herself out of the lake. When she reached the lakeshore, the sun replaced the moon in the sky. The moon seamlessly faded out as a hot Mediterranean summer sun faded in. The good-looking stranger extended his hand to help her stand up. “Thanks,” she said. “Welcome,” he said. She gazed into his ice-blue eyes. His face… she did not know what face to give him yet. But standing there in front of him, she felt the honey trickle down her body, and she realized she was naked, and she was naked because at that moment she desired to be… She made the man with the ice-blue eyes fulfill her wish. Her lust was the puppet master. She made him pull her towards him, made him lick all of the honey off her, and then she made him… Her phone rang, and she was pulled back into the real world where she was lying on the sofa by the window with her phone, which was now vibrating, in her right hand. Her left hand was in her underwear. The call was from an unknown number, and it was 1:09 AM, which meant it was either someone calling a wrong number or a call she did not want to answer. She wanted to return to the arms of the stranger with ice-blue eyes. She longed to go back. Before declining the call, she wondered whom it could be. She waited a minute to see if the same number would call again, but no call came. So, she allowed herself to drift back into her fantasies, and this time she gave the young man a face, the face of the bartender with the nice smile and ice-blue eyes who served her drinks two nights ago.

The Real Nightmare Begins When You Wake Up

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

You don’t wake up from a nightmare; you wake into one. This is one of the first things we learn from reading Franz Kafka’s works.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up from a nightmare to find himself in one far worse than the one he was dreaming: he discovers that he has metamorphosed into a monstrous insect. In The Trial, Joseph K. wakes up to find himself arrested without committing a crime or doing anything wrong. In The Castle, K. is woken by a young man who, out of nowhere, tells him that he needs permission from the Castle to sleep where he is already sleeping because everything, including the inn, belongs to the Castle.

When you scratch the surface of (the experienced) reality, the Kafkaesque is what you’ll get. The Kafkaesque is this ridiculously complex and illogical universe that the simulation (i.e., world) we’re in is based on. Everything in the simulation is logical and can be explained to a five-year-old until you look at the code.

The simulation we’re in is the experienced reality but not reality itself, (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer simulation). As Kant would put it, it is the phenomenon but not the noumenon. The simulation hides the nightmarish qualities of the Kafkaesque, which lies beneath the surface of the experienced reality and is where what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again.

In the world of our experienced reality, we live as if everything makes sense, but we’re just not thinking about it at the moment, when, in reality, experienced reality will collapse as soon as we start thinking about it. That’s how you scratch its surface, by THINKING. “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” Albert Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. When we start to think (to doubt), we will find ourselves standing next to Descartes, losing our minds (actually, losing everything but our minds) in a world created by some evil genius. “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this evil genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity,” writes Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy.

When what doesn’t make sense doesn’t make sense again, that’s when we know we’re on our way to (re)discover the [what?].

Between experienced reality and reality itself, there is the Kafkaesque. All those who “exit” the simulation find themselves in it. Waking up in the Kafkaesque, however, does not mean you’re fully awake. The first time you wake up, you enter the nightmare. But the journey doesn’t end there. Beyond the nightmare, another world awaits…

Unfortunately, like Kafka’s protagonists, we eventually always choose to continue living as usual even in the nightmare, as if the status quo was never disturbed, as if everything unquestionably makes sense, as if “it’s just the way the world works”, as if “this is life”, as if there are no other ways to live than default living. That’s what makes the Kafkaesque truly Kafkaesque, living ordinarily even when we find ourselves in the extraordinary.

And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber…

— Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 25, 2026.

Quotes from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and What Nietzsche has in common with Buddha

Notes and Quotes from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is one of those books everyone must read. Not only because it’s a classic, nor because Hesse is the winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in literature, but because reading Siddhartha will make the reader, whoever he is, (a tiny bit) wiser (even if he doesn’t plan on becoming a Buddhist).

Where Buddha and Nietzsche Briefly Meet

Sitting at my desk in my study, the book in my hands, I’m thinking about this quote:

Seeking means having a goal, but finding means being free, open, having no goal.

– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Having a goal chains you to it…
Have no goal unchains you…

The goal is a target; to hit the target, one must aim at it; to aim at a target, one must focus on it alone; therefore, the person who has a goal only sees through the rifle scope that is aimed at the object; and consequently, the surrounding world, the one outside his field of vision, ceases to matter and eventually disappears. Any thing or event that cannot be linked to (or get him closer to) his object of desire is a distraction, an obstacle, a waste of time. The determined, enterprising man’s world is limited, small, so small that the free spirit (trapped in it) feels claustrophobic. He lives in the parameters of his goal. The aimless man’s world, on the other hand, is much larger, boundless — most importantly, much slower…

For a moment, we find ourselves at an intersection where Buddha and Nietzsche briefly meet. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that “the unceasing desire to create is vulgar.” He then adds: “If a man is something, it is not really necessary to do anything — and yet he does a great deal. There is a human species higher even than the ‘productive’ man.”

More Quotes from Hesse’s Siddhartha:

The opposite of every truth is also just as true! It is like this: A truth can be expressed and cloaked in words only if it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought in thoughts and expressed in words is one-sided, only a half.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Wisdom is not expressible. Wisdom, when a wise man tries to express it, always sounds like foolishness.

– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Let seeing through the world, explaining it, looking down on it, be the business of great thinkers. The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself — being able to regard it and myself and all beings with love, admiration, and reverence.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha