His sense came from the belief that most people misunderstood the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to be punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But as Kafka saw it, exile from Paradise came as a result of not eating from the Tree of Life. Had we eaten from that other tree that also stood in the center of the garden, we would have woken to the presence of the eternal within us, to what Kafka called “the indestructible.”
