“And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment.”
– Kafka, ‘An Imperial Message’
This is part of a much longer paragraph about futility. What I love about this quote is how, despite the overwhelming impossibilities, Kafka still fervently describes what could be–and what could be is still full of impossibility, and so on and so on. In this way, he portrays the mixed feelings of a sort of defeat very effectively.
I’m going to read “In the Penal Colony” this week, and also impatiently waiting for a book of Kafka’s complete short works from the library…
Classics Considered 
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