Boy wonderfully depressed and reflecting himself

Franz kafka 'A Childhood photograph' Illuminations Walter benjamin

This passage seemed hard to comprehend but I'll try. It first starts out with the muse of Kafka's photograph of him as a young boy. In the strangeness that benjamin is cultivating we consider him as a sad boy in an essay memorialising his death.

I'm not sure how it segways into the rest of the essay but he begins to talk how Kafka was the writer of non-religious parables. Kind of furthering Benjamin's inference about stories he's mentioned in past essays. Setting them up to be something with essence and then truncating them in way that they still exist but altered in a way that one has to contemplate their actual motive for being read.

Kafkas stories are imbued with a strange ethereal quality. Benjamin has declared them non-religious parables but hasn't put to mind what purpose a non-religious parable is for other than to marvel at its otherness.

Narcissus Imagines Philostratus

Narcissus is the boy who falls in love with his own reflection. Curiously he seems to be similar to olympus in his lack of awareness of what's around him. Unlike olympus he is not communing with nature but rather being deceived by it--maybe willing.

His love for himself is also put in simile with the hunt he just finished. The author says he can not tell if his exhausted expression is from the hunt or his desire for his image.

Another curious thing is how the painting itself is described as being true to life. It's almost as if it was reflected and there's a mention of a bee being painted so realistically that it could be considered real. This might be alluding to an old art history story where two painters contest each other's ability. One fools a bee to think his flowers are real while the second painter fools the first into think his painting is behind a curtain when it is actually a painting of a curtain.