Quotes
We're lowly employees who can barely make our way through such documents, and whose only role in your affair is to stand guard over you ten hours a day and get paid for it. That's all we are, but we're smart enough to realize that before ordering such an arrest the higher authorities who employ us inform themselves in great detail about the person they're arresting and the grounds for the arrest. There's been no mistake.
The inspector cries out as if he has to wake me up, practically shouting; unfortunately I'll have to shout too, to show you how it was; all he shouts is his name, by the way.
...before falling asleep he reflected briefly on his conduct: he was pleased with it, but was surprised that he didn't feel even more pleased; he was seriously concerned on Fräulein Bürstner's behalf because of the captain.
He regretted his plan, which had at first seemed so practical. As he was approaching the fifth floor he decided to give up the search, took his leave from a friendly young worker who wanted to lead him further upward, and started back down. But then, annoyed once more by the futility of the whole enterprise, he returned and knocked at the first door on the fifth floor.
K. let him lead the way; it turned out that there was indeed a narrow path free through the swirling crowd, one that possibly divided two parties; this possibility was further supported by the fact that K. saw scarcely a face turned toward him in the closest rows on his left and right, but merely the backs of people addressing their words and gestures solely to those in their own party.
Your question, Your Honor, about my being a house painter -- and you weren't really asking at all, you were telling me outright -- is characteristic of the way these entire proceedings against me are being conducted. You may object that these aren't proceedings at all, and you're certainly right there, they are only proceedings if I recognize them as such... what has happened to me is merely a single case and as such of no particular consequence, since I don't take it very seriously, but it is typical of the proceedings being brought against many people. I speak for them, not myself... The examining magistrate here beside me has just given one of you a secret signal. So there are those among you who are being directed from up here... there can be no doubt that behind all the pronouncements of this court, and in my case, behind the arrest and today's inquiry, there exists an extensive organization. An organization that not only engages corrupt guards, inane inspectors, and examining magistrates who are at best mediocre, but that supports as well a system of judges of all ranks, including the highest, with their inevitable innumerable entourage of assistants, scribes, gendarmes, and other aides, perhaps even hangmen, I won't shy away from the word... So!... I see you're all officials, you're the corrupt band I was speaking about; you've crowded in here to listen and snoop, you've formed apparent parties and had one side applaud to test me, you wanted to learn how to lead innocent men astray.
The two parties, which had appeared to hold such contrasting opinions before, mingled with one another, some people pointing their fingers at K., others at the examining magistrate. The foglike haze in the room was extremely annoying, even preventing any closer observation of those standing further away... K. was interrupted by a shriek from the other end of the hall; he shaded his eyes so that he could see, for the dull daylight had turned the haze into a blinding white glare.
"I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact," said the examining magistrate, "that you have today deprived yourself -- although you can't yet have realized it -- the advantage that an interrogation offers to the arrested man in each case."
K. didn't leaf through any further, but simply opened to the frontispiece of the second book, a novel entitled *The Torments Grete Suffered at the Hands of Her Husband Hans*.
"You see," said the court usher, "they're always taking her away from me. Today is Sunday, and I have no official duties, but just to get me out of the way, they send me off with a message that's meaningless anyway. And infact I'm not sent far, so that thhe hope remains that if I really hurry, I might get back in time. I run as fast as I can to the office they've sent me to... but the student has moved even faster than I have... If I weren't so dependent on them, I would have long since crushed the student against this wall."
"Wouldn't you like to sit down?" K. sat down immediately and propped his elbows on the arms of the chair for better support. "You're a little dizzy, aren't you?" she asked him... "Don't worry," she said, "there's nothing unusual about that here, almost everyone has an attack like this the first time." ... But K. didn't want to go to the infirmary; that was precisely what he wanted to avoid, being led farther on, for the farther he went, the worse things would get... in reality it would have done him a good deal to sit down; he felt seasick. He thought he was on a ship, rolling in heavy seas. It seemed to him that the waters were pounding against the wooden walls, there was a roar from the depths of the hallway like the sound of breaking waves, the hallway seemed to pitch and roll, lifting and lowering the waiting clients on both sides... He realized at last that they were speaking to him, but he couldn't understand them; he heard only the noise that filled everything, through which a steady, high-pitched sound like a siren seemed to emerge... he heard beside him: "First he wants to leave, then you can tell him a hundred times that this is the exit and he doesn't move."
"Sir," said Willem, while Franz apparently tried to seek safety behind him from the third man, "if you knew how poorly we're paid, you'd judge us more kindly. I have a family to feed and Franz here wants to get married, you try to make money however you can, just working isn't enough, nno matter how hard you try... of course, it was wrong, but it's a tradition that the undergarments belong to the guards, it's always been that way, believe me;"... "you have to admit we did a good job from the authorities' point of view-wwe had prospects for advancement and would soon have been floggers ourselves, like him..."
"Because I don't even consider them guilty; it's the organization that's guilty, it's the high officials who are guilty."
It tormented him that he had been unable to prevent the flogging, but it wasn't his fault;... No one could really demand such a sacrifice of him.
As he passed by the junk room again on his way home, he opened the door as if by habit. What he saw, in place of the expected darkness, bewildered him completely. Everything was unchanged, just as he had found it the previous evening when he opened the dor. The printed forms and ink bottles just beyond the threshold, the flogger with the rod, the guards, still completely clothed, the candle on the shelf, and the guards began to wail, crying out: "Sir!" K. slammed the door shut at once and pounded his fists against it, as if to close it more tightly... he headed for home, tired and with his mind a blank.
"Please don't ask for names, but stop making that mistake, don't be so stubborn; you can't defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess. Confess the first chance you get. That's the only chance you have to escape, the only one."
He had often considered whether it might not be advisable to prepare a written defense and submit it to the court. In it he would offer a brief overview of his life, and for each event of any particular importance, explain why he had acted as he did, whether in his present judgment this course of action deserved approval or censure, and what reasons he could advance for the one or the other.
The only proper approach is to learn to accept existing conditions. Even if it were possible to improve specific details-which, however, is merely an absurd superstition-one would have at best achieved something for future cases, while in the process damaging oneself immeasurably by having attracted the attention of an always vengeful bureaucracy. Just don't attract attention! Keep calm, no matter how much it seems counter to good sense. Try to realize that this vast judicial organism remains, so to speak, inn a state of eternal equilibrium, and that if you change something on your own where you are, you can cut the ground out from your own feet and fall, while the vast organism easily compensates for the minor disturbance at some other spot-after all, everything is interconnected-and remains unchanged, if not, which is likely, even more resolute, more vigilant, more severe, more malicious.
Above all, if he wanted to get anywhere, he had to reject the notion of any possible guilt right from the start. There was no guilt.
"It's the figure of Justice," the painter finally said. "Now I recognize it," said K., "there's the blindfold over her eyes and here are the scales. But aren't those wings on her heels, and isn't she in motion? "Yes, said the painter, "I'm commissioned to do it that way, it's actually Justice and the goddess of Victory in one." "That's a poor combination," said K. smiling, "Justice must remain at rest, otherwise the scales sway and no just judgment is possible."... in this brightness the figure seemed to stand out strikingly; now it scarcely recalled the goddess of Justice, or even that of Victory, now it looked just like the goddess of the Hunt.
...he said, as quietly as the painter: "I think you're contradicting yourself." "How?" the painter asked patiently and leaned back with a smile. This smile made K. feel as if he were trying to reveal contradictions not so much in the words of the painter as in the legal process itself.
"Such acquittals are said to have occurred, of course," said the painter. "But that's extremely difficult to determine. The final verdicts of the court are not published, and not even the judges have access to them; thus only legends remain about ancient court cases. These tell of actual acquittals, of course, even in a majority of cases; you can believe them, but they can't be proved true. Nevertheless they shouldn't be entirely ignored; they surely contain a certain degree of truth, and they are very beautiful; I myself have painted a few pictures based on such legends."
"Who's your lawyer?" "You are," said Block. "And other than me?" asked the lawyer. "No one but you," said Block. "Then don't listen to anyone else," said the lawyer. Block accepted this totally;...
What is it you want? You're still alive, you're still under my protection. It's senseless anxiety! You've read somewhere that in some cases the final judgment comes unexpectedly from some chance person at some random moment. With numerous reservations that's true of course, but it's equally true that your anxiety disgusts me and that I see in it a lack of necessary faith.
The first thing K. saw, and in part surmised, was a tall knight inn armor, portrayed at the extreme edge of the painting. He was leaning on his sword, which he had thrust into the bare earth-only a few blades of grass sprang up here and there-before him. He seemed to be gazing attentively at a scene taking place directly in front of him... he discovered it was a conventional depiction of the entombment of Christ, and moreover a fairly recent one.
K. hesitated and stared at the floor. At the moment he was still free; he could walk on and leave through one of the three small dark wooden doors not far from him. That would mean he hadn't understood or that he had indeed understood but couldn't be bothered to respond. But if he turned around he was caught, for then he would have confessed that he understood quite well, that he really was the person named, and that he was prepared to obey.
"But I'm not guilty," said K. "It's a mistake. How can any person in general be guilty? We're human after all, each and every one of us."
Then the priest screamed down at K.: "Can't you see two steps in front of you?" It was a cry of rage, but at the same time it was the cry of someone who, seeing a man falling, shouts out in shock, involuntarily, without thinking.
Nevertheless, the priest's good intentions seemed clear to K.; it was not impossible that they might come to terms if he would come down, it was not impossible that he might receive some form of decisive and acceptable advice from him, something that might show him, for example, not how to influence the trial, but how to break out of it, how to get around it, how to live outside the trial.
"You're deceiving yourself about the court," said the priest, "in the introductory texts to the Law it says of this deception: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he'll be allowed to enter later. 'It's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now.' Since the gate to the Law stands open as always, and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man bends down to look through the gate into the interior. WWhen the doorkeeper sees this he laughs and says, 'If you're so drawn to it, go ahead and try to enter, even though I've forbidden it. But bear this in mind: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, however, stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the one before. The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.'... he decides he would prefer to wait until he receives permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. He sits there for days and years... Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it's really getting darker around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn't have much longer to live now. Before he dies, everything he has experienced over the years coalesces in his mind into a single question he has never asked the doorkeeper... 'Everyone strives to reach the Law,' says the man, 'how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance. The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: 'No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I'm going to go and shut it now.'"
The commentators tell us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.
"Don't misunderstand me," said the priest, "I'm just pointing out the various opinions that exist on the matter. You mustn't pay too much attention to opinions. The text is immutable, and the opinions are often only an expression of despair over it."
"I don't agree with that opinion," said K., shaking his head, "for if you accept it, you have to consider everything the doorkeeper says as true. But you've already proved conclusively that that's not possible." "No," said the priest, "you don't have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary." "A depressing opinion," said K. "Lies are made into a universal system."
"First you must see who I am," said the priest. "You're the prison chaplain," said K. and drew nearer to the priest; his immediate return to the bank wasn't so important as he'd thought, he could easily stay here longer. "Therefore I belong to the court," said the priest. "Why should I want something from you. The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go."
"The only thing I can do now," he said to himself, and the way his steps matched those of the other three confirmed his thoughts, "the only thing I can do now is keep my mind calm and analytical to the last. I've always wanted to seize the world with twenty hands, and what's more with a motive that was hardly laudable. That was wrong; do I want to show now that even a yearlong trial could teach me nothing? Do I want to leave the parting impression that I'm slow-witted? Shall they say of me that at the beginning of my trial I wanted to end it, and now, at its end, I want to begin it again?"
Then one man opened his frock coat and, from a sheath on a belt that encircled his vest, drew forth a long, thin, double-edged butcher knife, held it up, and tested its sharpness in the light. Once more the nauseating courtesies began, one of them passed the knife across K. to the other, who passed it back over K. K. knew clearly now that it was his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him and plunge it into himself. But he didn't do so; instead he twisted his still-free neck and looked about him... His gaze fell upon the top story of the building adjoining the quarry. Like a light flicking on, the casements of a window flew open, a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and height, leaned far out abruptly, and stretched both arms out even further. Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can't withstand a person who wants to live. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he'd never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one man were right at K.'s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. "Like a dog!" he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.