“There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they did not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.”
–Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Which is perhaps why for Kafka prayer, as patient persevering, was the only messianic imperative that could break with the worldly as a horizon of reconciliation between the apparent conflict of passive waiting for the miracle, something that is nurtured by indolence, and a celebratory sense of quick accomplishment bred by impatience. For this alone, Kafka should be crowned as one of the reigning saints of revolutionary pessimism.
Beyond Capital 