Franz Kafka’s Poseidon
Franz Kafka’s Poseidon
sat at his desk doing the accounts. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted — and he did have very many — but since he took his job seriously, he would in the end go over all the figures and calculations himself, and so his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him.
But he did it, nonetheless, and with a kind of regularity and constancy which the CEO of any organisation would have appreciated. Sumatra, Tonga, the Samoas: only the latest entries in the Sea Director’s neat, double-columned book.
That is the point: Poseidon has always known what he is doing. His system of earthquakes and the terrifyingly fast (600 mph) oceanic waves they can generate has been steadily at work for some three billion years.
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