Absent-minded Window-gazing

"Absent-minded Window-gazing" is among the shortest of the eighteen sketches in Franz Kafka's Betrachtung (Meditation, 1912). It records a single glance out of a window on a spring evening: the surprise of the light, a cheek leaned against the window fastening, and below in the street the sinking sun catching a girl's face as a man's shadow moves up behind her.

There is no plot — only the texture of looking. In a few lines Kafka fixes the small, almost involuntary act of watching the world go by, and the way ordinary light and movement can briefly absorb the whole of one's attention.