But that was a terrible gift; true, it spared K. a great many lies and deceptions, but it also deprived him of almost all his defenses, hampered him in the struggle and would have made him despair if he had not been obliged to tell himself that the difference between himself and the authorities in terms of power was so enormous that all the lies and cunning he would have been capable of wouldn’t have produced any significant reduction of that difference to his advantage and would necessarily have had to remain more or less negligible.
