The Castle Has No Front Door

Kafka’s land surveyor K. is summoned to a Castle that he can see from the village but never reaches. Letters arrive, officials contradict one another, and a decision that governs his whole life is always being made in a room he will never enter. What stays with you about The Castle is how reasonable everything sounds. Nobody is cruel. The system is simply built so that those who live under it have no door to knock on. I thought of K. this Monday while reading through the weekend’s news. Eight or nine separate stories share one architecture. Ordinary people in Kyiv, Warsaw, Lyon and Atlanta are waiting on verdicts issued from somewhere out of reach.