The Castle

by Franz Kafka

Wherever you go, keep in mind that you’re the most ignorant person here and be careful; here with us you’ll be out of harm’s way with Frieda present, so you may chatter to your heart’s content, you can even show us how you plan to talk to Klamm, but in reality, in reality … please, oh please don’t do it.”

Nowhere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places.

You were, as you say, taken on as a surveyor, but we don’t need a surveyor. There wouldn’t be the least bit of work for a person like that. The boundaries of our small holdings have been marked out, everything has been duly registered, the properties themselves rarely change hands, and whatever small boundary disputes arise, we settle ourselves. So why should we have any need for a surveyor?”

Respect for the authorities is innate here, and then it’s instilled in you throughout your lives in many different ways and from all sides, and you yourselves help this along as best you can.

“We are complaining,” said Jeremias, “that you cannot take a joke.

True, K. remained conscious of the fact that his weariness today had done him greater harm than all the unfavorable circumstances; why couldn’t he, who had believed that he could rely on his own body and who, if it hadn’t been for that belief, wouldn’t have set out at all, why couldn’t he put up with a few bad nights and one sleepless one, why did he become so uncontrollably tired, here of all places, where nobody was tired, or rather where everybody was constantly tired, though it didn’t harm their work and even seemed to further it.

Yet she didn’t ask maliciously, as she used to do, but sadly, as though she had meanwhile become acquainted with the malice of the world, in the face of which all one’s own malice gives way and becomes meaningless;