To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc.

You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't 'get' Kafka. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.

That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke - that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. “It's not that students don't 'get' Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get - the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.” Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy.

What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. “He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity.

Oblivion wallace