A Hunger Artist

There was an age when a man could grow famous by eating nothing, when crowds gathered at a barred cage to watch him fast and butchers stood guard day and night so he could not sneak a meal. Kafka's hunger artist is the last practitioner of this dying art, held to forty days by an impresario who knows that is where interest peaks. When fasting falls out of fashion he is moved to a circus stall on the way to the menagerie, where the crowd rushes past toward the animals and no one bothers to change the board counting his days. He goes on starving, unwatched, longer than anyone has. Then comes the confession that turns the whole thing inside out: he was never worth admiring, because he fasted only since he could never find a food he liked. Kafka wrote this as tuberculosis closed his own throat, correcting proofs while eating became impossible. When the artist dies they put a young panther in his cage, joy roaring through its body, and the crowd presses close, unable to look away.