The Blue Notebooks - Max Richter

I cannot stop listening to this album. Every time I put it on the music and Kafka's words keep haunting me. This is your ultimate night soundtrack (no mr. Richter it's not about the nature of daylight!). I've mentioned Kafka's book before but I really have to buy "The Blue Octavo Notebooks" soon. Apparantly, from late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka stopped writing entries in his diary, which he kept in quarto-sized notebooks, but continued to write in a series of smaller, octavo-sized notebooks. When Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks--which include short stories, fragments of stories, and other literary writings--because, "Notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception." The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known yet are among the most characteristic of Kafka’s work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka’s most famous aphorisms in their original context.

Here are the words Tilda Swinton reads aloud on the album (the lyrics so to speak). I wonder why Richter dropped the word Octavo though?

"The Blue Notebooks"

Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens - say at night, when everything round about is quiet - one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

"Shadow Journal"
How enduring; how we need durability.
The sky before sunrise is soaked with light. Rosy colour tints buildings, bridges, and the Seine. I was here when she with whom I walk wasn't born yet, and the cities on a distant plain stood intact - before they rose in the air with the dust of sepulchral brick, and the people who lived there didn't know. Only this moment, at dawn, is real to me. The bygone lives are like my own past life: uncertain. I cast a spell on the city, asking it to last.

"Arboretum"
November the 6th. Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear when it's once more covered with dry leaves.

"Old Song"
February the 10th. Sunday. Noise. Peace.

"The Trees"
When Thomas brought the news that the house I was born in no longer exists - neither the name, nor the park sloping to the river - nothing - I had a dream of return. Multicoloured. Joyous. I was able to fly. And the trees were even higher than in childhood, because they had been growing during all the years since they had been cut down.