The Profoundest Interruption: In Defense of Distraction

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• The Profoundest Interruption:In Defense of Distraction
• Caitlin Horrocks (bio)

Evil is whatever distracts.

–Franz Kafka

I’ve had this quote on my phone’s camera roll since September 2021, when I saw it written on a sandwich board sign outside a skate shop in my neighborhood. Kafka’s declaration stopped me in my tracks: Evil? Really? Maybe? I hope not. I took a photo so I could keep thinking about it. Then I mostly tried not to think about it. I had, at the time, highly distracting one-year-old twins, plus a nearly-as-distracting five-year-old, plus the various distractions of constant daycare-borne illnesses and work and life and the friends my husband and I almost never saw and missed, and the writing projects we had no time for, and missed. Still, I did not think of those things as evil.

Trying to focus on something despite the pings of notifications or the mental buzzing of our own worries, through the physical demands of needy children or of our own bodies, seems to me a [End Page 344] near-universal experience in our current age. But the relationship of distraction to creativity or contemplation is usually viewed as a straightforward obstacle or personal weakness to be overcome. The “proper” response to distraction is resistance. To meet it willingly, with abandon, is the capitulation of a lazy mind. Distraction can be destructive, keeping us splashing always in the shallows. But rather than Kafka, the quote I want to believe comes from a poem entitled “On Buzz Aldrin’s Birthday” by Marianne Chan:

But the mindhas its sundry destinationswhere it lands to findsources of water.

My mind has its sundry destinations, frankly, whether I want it to or not, and I would like to believe that there is water there, rather than barren doomscroll desert.

When I could finally bring myself to think again about that quote on the sign, what I wanted was a loophole, some version of #notalldistractions. I found what I needed in Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger, which discusses the lesser-known Kafka work of non-fiction, “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines,” written for his day job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in 1910. In it, Kafka warns that industrial planing machines are so poorly designed, and the work conditions so inherently dangerous, that no level of vigilant attention can keep the worker completely safe, or even in possession of all his fingers. In general, Kafka’s insurance work treated moments of distraction, even those with physically disastrous consequences, as inevitable. As, Duttlinger puts it, “a statistical constant rather than a matter of personal responsibility.” [End Page 345]

Kafka’s fiction, as well as his diary entries and letters, also wrestles with distraction, but in conflicted and less forgiving ways. In the short story “The Hunter Gracchus,” the momentary distraction of a mountain goat causes the hunter to fall to his death. In his daily life, Kafka famously felt besieged by ordinary domestic noises. To a girl he was ostensibly courting, he wrote that his ideal mode of existence would be to live “in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. . . . How I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For utmost concentration knows no effort.” The pairing of “drag it up” and “without effort” is striking to me, but Kafka knew what he was trying to describe: such a perfect state of creative flow had produced his short story “The Judgement,” written over the course of a single night in 1912. He spent the rest of his life attempting to re-achieve such a state of “utmost concentration.” But he also acknowledges that this would not be a sustainable state; the animal protagonist of a late career story, “The Burrow,” is eventually driven mad by the pursuit of a perfectly silent underground fortress.

We may at least occasionally wish for someone to set our food...