Whose rules?
In Franz Kafka’s Before the Law, a man approaches a gate that leads to The Law.
He’s met with a gatekeeper, who he asks for permission from to enter.
The gatekeeper teases him, saying it’s possible but just not now.
The man waits until old age, never succeeding in getting permission to enter.
In his final days he asks the guard why no one else has come to ask for permission to enter this door.
The guard’s chilling response: “… this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
It’s a tragic tale that begs a couple of questions:
- Why did on Earth did he never attempt to walk through?
- What would it have taken for him to walk through?
Maybe the guard would have just let him in if only he’d attempted to walk in first. Maybe his attempt would have been met with some resistance at first, but then he would be eventually manage to get in. Or maybe his attempts would fail, proving to be no match for the guard.
At least in all three alternate scenarios one thing would have been true: he would have tried and learned a little bit more about the true nature of the guard.
It was a door specially designed for him — a chilling metaphor representing our attempts to transition from one way of life to another. The guard —a metaphor for the rules and constructs we’ve come to implicitly trust that must be questioned and challenged in order to find a way through.
