Franz Kafka's Resolutions is only a handful of sentences long. Slipped in here amongst the big novels. Resolutions is the one where a narrator, after addressing the problem of lifting oneself out of a miserable mood, rejects any active solution - surely even one little slip courts disaster? - and instead considers a passive solution. This solution means making oneself into an inert mass, and staring at others with the eyes of an animal, and without hesitation with one's own hand throttling down all remnants of life within one until a graveyard-peace broadens wider than the graveyard.
And then he writes that 'A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows'. Well some of us find it funny.
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