The Neighboring Village

THE NEIGHBORING VILLAGE consists of three-and-a-half settings of a two-sentence short story by Franz Kafka, and a musical enactment of the telescoping of time that the story describes. The first setting is one minute in length. Setting two is twice as long at two minutes. Setting three is twice as long as that at four minutes. Setting four is slower still. It would be eight minutes if allowed to continue at the pace set, but ends mid-sentence, only half-way through the text.

As narrative becomes less taut in each setting, the story’s meaning is expressed more purely through form — the short journey/story becomes, in these settings, increasingly eternal — the destination of the village receding farther and farther into the distance. The final setting is just partial, as at that point we can imagine the process of telescoping continuing into infinity.

In my reading, Kafka seems to offer us two linked perspectives: While we can hope to achieve almost nothing in life (there’s both not enough time and endless digressions to face), in the end everything we could want — perhaps even total abundance, timelessness — lies in the expanding distance between here and the very next village.

– Gregory Spears