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take us some time to master them. For the time being, he would let us sit with our backs straight and eyes half closed.
    â€œEvery second in which you manage to keep your mind clear,” he proclaimed in a deep voice, “is a crack in your armor through which tenderness and clarity may enter.”
    The guru turned out to be full of love, especially for the women with the best bodies. He kept helping them to correct their posture. He was particularly concerned that, when they breathed in, they had to lift their chest, and he checked this from behind with his hands on their breasts. The women weren’t allowed to wear a bra during meditation because he said it “restricted the breath of life.” I think I must have been very skilled at breathing and meditating as he never had to help me.
    That Saturday night there was a great commotion when he chose a young girl for Tantric Initiation. He’d lavished attention on her during the meditation exercise, and now she was refusing the privilege, saying she wasn’t ready. The guru was furious and ridiculed her in front of the group. “Until you get rid of your petit bourgeois hang-ups, there is no hope of liberation for you.”
    What was clear to me was that the guru was very far from penetrating the deep folds of reality. One could generously say that the light of his enlightenment was forty watts at most.

Franz and Milena
    After a boring essay-writing class, I gave a lesson on contemporary literature to my fourth-year students. There were eight of them, quite a nice group, and they were fluent in German, even though it was a struggle to get them to read a whole book.
    Since this was an introductory course, we spent two weeks on each author. I gave a short presentation with some biographical information and a few details about the works we were studying. I gave the students a subject to prepare and asked them to talk about it in class.
    This is the way they teach humanities in Germany. In Spain, however, it’s hard to get students to take any initiative. Most of them prefer the traditional method, in which the lecturer dictates the same notes year after year and the students scribble away, never once raising their heads.
    That day, the paper was on Franz Kafka. Many students feel intimidated by him because of the common prejudice that his books are difficult, but I argued that nothing could be further from the truth. In order to demonstrate this, I wrote on the blackboard the first sentences from two of his key works,
The Metamorphosis
and
The Trial
.
    One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from a fitful, dream-filled sleep, he found that he had changed into a monstrous insect.
    Someone must have been slandering Josef K., because one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
    Before giving my students their assignment, I talked briefly about Kafka’s life, skipping the obvious facts, such as his problems with his father. Instead, I focused on some of the more insignificant details—for example, the fact that he had an uncle in Madrid who got to be director-general of a railway company. I also told them that Kafka used to sleep every afternoon for four and a half hours, and that at the end of his life he dreamed of opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv and working there as a waiter.
    I guess this is gossip culture infiltrating the classroom, but if you want to interest students you have to put yourself on their level.
    I devoted the last twenty minutes of my lesson to Kafka’s correspondence. Apart from his unfinished novels, he sent the women who loved him hundreds of wonderful letters. Probably the best among them were those he wrote to Milena Jesenská, who had translated some of his works into Czech.
    Unlike Kafka, she wasn’t Jewish, but after the German army occupied Czechoslovakia she was deported and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1944. One could almost say that Franz Kafka