ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
487
the earth, it must be only as a big rumbling waterfall noise, forever
unexplainable. Perhaps they call him "The Rumbler," or from the
sound of his breath "The Wheezer," and they;
think
of
him
as some–
thing supernatural because he cannot otherwise be imagined. Per–
haps they live in fear of
him,
but not knowing where he is, don't
know how to keep out of his way. At any rate, they are only build–
ing their own homes in what, as far as they can see, is their own
real estate, the earth that they were created into and have no choice
but to live in. And yet they must from time to time have an uneasy
feeling that they are trespassing. Else why are they! so furtive?
Why indeed
is
our protagonist himself so furtive? Why must he
devote
his
life to hiding? Does he not have a deep-seated sense of
guilt that he is after all on somebody's else's property, and that when
the big earth-creature comes, it
will
treat
him
so? Maybe
this
con–
tinuous noise that he hears is that of a tractor plowing
his
field,
sometimes near, sometimes farther away as it circles around, and
at some inevitable moment,
in
spite of the piece of moss so carefully
placed over his entrance, the walls so hard-packed by his bleeding
forehead, the tricky blind alleys, it will come crashing over his head
and crush
him
out of existence.
In other words, he has built himself a medieval fortress against
a hydrogen bomb, which is the curious position that the human race
now finds itself in. We have spent our history like this: raising in–
destructible walls around cities perched on impregnable rocks, sur–
rounding ourselves with swanns of battleships and flocks of fighter
planes, burrowing elaborate underground refuges, devising intricate
systems of danger detection and warning, always more advanced and
efficient. But here we stand at last defenseless against
this
new thing
that has leaped into being, and all our contrivances against our en–
emies are absurd and pitiful against this. To abandon our burrows and
run elsewhere is just as silly. There is nowhere to go.
Kafka's animal draws an inverted moral from his own story:
that he has wasted
his
youth in not being industrious enough. He had
a warning once when he was too young to be serious. He heard a
noise similar to this one, but listened to it with more curiosity than
fear, resting a while from the labor of digging
his
newly-begun home.
("I have rested far too often from my labors all my life," he
sa~.)
At that time he even thought, "Perhaps I am in somebody else's bur-
