finir: to finish, to end, to terminate, to complete.

~~~~~se mettre: to begin, to start, to place oneself.~~~~~

adumbrate (a-DUM-brayt) verb

1. foreshadow, prefigure.
2. overshadow.
3. shade, obscure.

Some snobs take special pleasure in looking down on others; some snobs dream of rising higher than they now are; and yet other snobs--reverse snobs--derive their comfort (and cold comfort it usually is) from feeling themselves outside the snobbery game altogether. The way you can tell a snob is by the energy he puts into these various operations: climbing, stopping others in mid-climb, rather too strenuously disassociating himself from the climb. The snob cares a little--and often a lot--more about these things than he or she ought.

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”