It has to be one image because these are two faces of the same situation. But what sense are we to make of confident uncertainty? And how else can we describe hope, the faith which transcends all immediate disheartening evidence?

The story of Eden appeals to Kafka because it contains the duality he is always presenting: on the one hand unconscious harmony, on the other the concept of disintegration. He understands the Fall as a present situation, our condition of self-awareness, not as an event which took place on a particular day in the remote past when man’s nature suddenly switched from insight to introspection, and integration fell to pieces. ‘Only our concept of time,’ he says in one of his notes, ‘leads us to call the Last Judgement by that name. In fact, it’s a court in standing session.’ In other words, it’s taking place now, all the time. Kafka might also have said (but did not) that it is only our concept of time which makes us think of the expulsion from Paradise as a kind of ‘first judgement’. It is another court in standing session, which his central character faces every day, waking into the strange country of dream, at the same time both familiar and foreign. The Fall as seen by Kafka is a legendary image of a perpetual human condition now experienced by an individual in Prague and projected as literature.

Man knows about disintegration (it is his world) and he inexplicably senses concealed harmony. In The Castle these ideas are presented in tandem because they exist together in our perception (where else can they be?). The idea of harmony can only be a projection from what we know, so the duality of divine and devilish or Apollo and Dionysus is a duality only in the mind. These are two aspects of the same world, the god with two faces. Apollo is Dionysus organized. Goethe knew at eighteen that hell and heaven are not separate places but a divided perception of the same world, and Kafka writes to Milena: ‘Nobody sings as purely as those in deepest hell. What we take for the song of angels is their song.’

Kafka makes several references to the Fall, and consequently to his ideas on the nature of sin, in Reflections, a series of his aphorisms collected by himself from scattered sources and so (one may believe) considered by him to be of special importance. Here he ascribes the Fall of Man and the catastrophe of consciousness to impatience, classified as the main human sin. ‘It was because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, it is because of impatience they do not return there.’ What he means by impatience is seen from another entry: ‘All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of the methodical, an apparent fencing-in of the apparent issue’. The ‘methodical’ must be the continuous process of life, running constantly from one organic manifestation to another. (It is impossible to speak of unity except through the language of division, our only semantic tool.) Method is the pattern of causation broken by man through classification by thought. Experience is reduced to the limits of human perception, phenomena are segments fenced-in from the flow.

These segments are however our only experience and our only approach. The truth is already there. Nobody makes it. It is waiting to be found along the lines of causation, beyond the accidental limits of individual perception.

‘One must write into the dark,’ says Kafka, ‘as if into a tunnel.’ And in another place: ‘My stories are a kind of closing one’s eyes.’ He is yearning for the state before the Fall, the satisfaction of the dark unconscious. And in his diaries he uses words which must come as a surprise to those who think of him as a drab pessimist: ‘It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by the right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.’

The writer as magician. Kafka’s works are a continuous effort to find the right word, the right name. To a friend he spoke of the act of writing as a conjuration of spirits, and in his notebooks he describes it as a form of prayer. In Kafka’s novels there is no complexity of prose surface to puzzle us; we are puzzled by its simplicity. Here feeling is form, and form is feeling, indistinguishable.