Whatever else Franz Kafka's striking and profound short story, The Hunger Artist, may be it is an allegory of spiritual dissatisfaction.
It opens with these evocative lines:
During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.
The strangely affecting, self-dramatizing, contrary narrator proceeds to chart this decline from the morbid curiosity of the marveling crowds and their grotesque merriment, to their eventual revulsion, malice and crushing indifference to the “suffering martyr” who perversely fasts on and on, after anyone, including himself, knew what records he had broken.
Interestingly, the longest period of fasting fixed by the hunger artist’s impresario was at 40 days, the length of Christ’s fast.
Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it, exclaims the narrator in exasperation, at one point in the story.
The unhappy ending of this human experiment involves the burial of the crazed old artist. And rather than leave his ‘perfectly good cage standing there unused,’ he is replaced by his antithesis: a young panther, his “body furnished almost to bursting point with all it needed.”
But, more than anything else, it is the haunting dying words of the hunger artist that best communicate the incommunicable:
. . . I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.
With this in mind, and during the holy month of Ramadan, I've been meditating on the benefits of abstinence. I believe fasting to be a form of practical mysticism, or a belief in privileged moments.
I think by denying the body food and drink, paradoxically, one nourishes the spirit. In that sense, fasting can stir whisperings of another world or glimpses into unchartered regions of the soul.
“Only something supernatural can express the supernatural,” says philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, which does not make it any clearer to the uninitiated. Yet fasting is this, too -- a pursuit of clarity and a hygiene of the spirit.
To put it differently, when poet Philip Larkin sighs: “Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” he voices the bitter-sweetness of self-sufficiency.
It is not deprivation per se that he is enamored with. It is having fallen in love with a pain, not for how it impoverishes but how it enriches: deepening and fortifying us, the way that fasting does.