490
PARTISAN REVIEW
share a disputed world, and even more than we have need to mitigate
the disputes, have we need of the spirit to live with them, for to
solve them all is not in our power. The animal's burrow has been
requisitioned, maybe by a bigger animal who can scarcely
be
chal–
lenged in his right to incorporate
it
into his own, or by the farmer
with the tractor who needs the field for
his
corn planting. It is too
bad. It is now time for
him
to meet his calamity. The
city
of Troy
was requisitioned-the gods had business of their own with it, to
which they stirred up the Greeks by a few simple tricks.
Both were thinking of something beyond hY,drogen bombs, and
maybe they knew in their secret hearts what they were thinking of.
But there are no adequate images. The problem is to get it into any
image, and
if
one can be found that will do for all times and places
and be stretchable for the sizes of all minds--that may even some–
times succeed in stretching the mind-much more could not be asked.
This
is
why Kafka does not identify the creature. It could be
anything. To a simple person it is at least a little animal working it–
self to death for nothing. To another it suggests the old lady next
door who feared a murderer and was struck by lightning, or the old
man nagging at
his
sons to work hard and put their money; in the
bank. Some of us think of the war that nothing seems able to stop.
And perhaps somebody will go all the way to the vision and see
what it really is that comes at last to take away from us this beloved
life, so perilously and wondrously festooned between the two rolling
clouds of darkness that spurted it out and will suck it back in again.
