ALLEGORY: A LIGHT CONCEIT
489
destroyer, for he
is
too small to conceive of it, and this
is
not his
fault or anyone's.
It
is
a phenomenon of creation. All his wretched
drudging and grubbing, scheming and hoarding, waking in a cold
sweat at night to plunge into the re-doing of everything-all this has
been against an enemy that
is
perhaps sitting over him the whole
time, watching and blinking, as a cat watches, half bored, half preda–
tory, the maneuvering of a frightened bug racing in and out of the
cracks under its paw. Maybe the cat will leave the bug alone a long
time because he
is
really not interested in it, but then at some totally
unpredictable instant, without purpose or malice, reach out his paw
and smash it.
Quite surely Kafka was not thinking of hydrogen bombs, for
he did not know about them. There
is
not, in fact, anY) word of
Kafka's story that could not have been written in 1000
B.
C., since
animals lived in burrows then just as they do now, and written by
Homer himself, with the same significance for the people then that it
has now. Only to them the earth was the kingdom of creation and
humans were the royalty of it, and so Homer spoke in the terms that
expressed himself and them. He told of the splendor of men in their
ships and towers rather than the misery and fear of a rodent in its
hole. But they both knew the same thing, these allegorists with nearly
three millennia between them, during which we so reluctantly retired
from our presumptuous post as the sum total of what there
is,
to
being merely and microscopically lost in the swirl of it-they knew
the same thing, and were saying it each in his own language: that
there
is
a vast calamity with which we cannot cope, and that we
would do best to live with what dignity and contentment we can
attain, coping with what we can, not fearing to meet that calamity
when it comes, not wasting what time has been allotted us by weav–
ing mosquito nets against it. That we would do best to accept the
fact that we own no property, that we are squatters by force upon a
planet we didn't make for ourselves. And how are we to know indeed
that it
is
not somebody else's planet, and we insects sucking at a
fruit on a tree that somebody else has raised? That security
is
not
possible for us any more than for the birds that hop on our lawns,
whose eveI)'j worm
is
yanked up and gobbled in haste and trembling
due to lurking enemies- any more than for the worm itself, who
would rather not be gobbled. That we, like all other earth-creatures,
