on trains, that TRP subject too, in early modernity. Everything speeds up.

[Mark Kohut]

>From an essay review in the TLS on some books on Kafka:
John Zilcosky has a fascinating essay on Kafka and trains, alerting us to the fact that in the early twentieth century there was as much anxiety about what train travel might do to you as there is today about jet travel. Apart from “train-induced neuroses”, symptoms included failing vision and eye fatigue, caused by the unnatural speed of trains. Gregor Samsa, we learn early on in “The Metamorphosis”, is a commercial traveller. It could just be that what he feels he has become, an insect, whose vision is getting worse by the day, is the result of the unnatural life he has to lead. He himself wonders if what has happened to him is simply that he has contracted a “standing ailment of commercial travellers”.
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