quote unquote

for john bloomberg-rissman on the occasion of his 70th turn around the sun

I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year old man.  Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis?  He wakes up to find that he's become a near-human-sized beetle. . .Our reactions, mine and Gregor's, are very similar.  We are confused and bemused, and think that it's a momentary delusion. . .These two scenarios, mine and Gregor's, seem so different, one might ask why I even bother to compare them.  The source of the transformation is the same, I argue: we have both awakened to a forced awareness of what we really are, and that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, mandatory reality, and life does not continue as it did.

david cronenberg [introduction to the metamorphosis by franz kafka; 2014 (originally quoted in the column 'anti gravity' by steve mirsky; Scientific American, december 2020)]