Aporia

Shirtless men converse on a stationary train, seen from ours as we passed through a station in southern China late at night. Why did I want so much to be on their train, as I want to be inside every living room or kitchen I spy through windows on city-walks in the evening? Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed on Kafka’s use of windows in The Trial:

[Kafka] created the extremely poetic image of an extremely nonpoetic world. By “extremely nonpoetic world” I mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of inhuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, history. By “extremely poetic image” I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn’t a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever-present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

Some such brief openings are K.’s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: “Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment.” Then he enters the courtyard: “Near him, a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were see-sawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water.”

These sentences remind me of Flaubert’s descriptions: concice; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is clichéd. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant, K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl…

As much as his sourceless, automatic shame and his thirst for reality, it is K.’s inability to keep such windows open that makes him a resonant, contemporary archetype; that Kafka writes “…K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl” means that the closing of this window is at least in part a matter of agency, of will strangely and mysteriously subverted by inhuman forces, just as is the trial itself. K. wishes but does not wish to escape, fears and pursues and indeed forces his own destruction, and seems to know but not know that reality exists all around him, awaits him, can save him. He flees it.

K. behaves as a man on a train who has only a moment’s attention to spare for the landscape he passes, the lives he can see through the windows, as do we all; but there is no train; there is not even a path; we are obliged to attend only to what we will ourselves to attend to; yet despite knowing that the reality we seek is so near at hand, despite thirsting for this reality —apart from the pseudoreality of offices, online networks, the news— we turn back to our phones, drop our faces and lower our eyes to them, ignore even the windows which themselves only provide hints of what we crave.