existed, twisted slowly shut behind me, narrowed and shrank to nothing. I felt more comfortable in the world of cats and it suited me better; the strong wind that blew after me out of my past, the strong wind full of a bank clerk’s concerns, a husband’s anxieties, a father’s angers, began to slacken; today it is only a gentle puff of air that plays about my paws as I run with my brothers and sisters through the dirty, beautiful streets of Prague, and the opening through which it blows, that leads back to my former life, through which I, the tabby Josef K, once came, has grown so small that even if I wished to get back to it, I should have to scrape the skin from my belly to crawl through. To put it plainly—and you know how I dislike to put things plainly!—life as an ape, gentlecats, insofar as something of that kind lies behind one, lies as far behind
him,”
and Gregor understood quite sharply that it was hewho was meant, “as it does behind me. Yet still he feels a tickle—all of us did, the small kitten and the great old queen alike.”
It caused Gregor Samsa a very great pain in his stomach to hear the tabby refer to a passage back to that life he had had before. He wished nothing so much as to wake up and find it all some horrible phantasm caused by too much dairy, and to hear Josef K idly ruminate on his feeling that it might be done if only he wished it enough caused his heart to bend inward in a bout of bitterness. All the cats seemed to be looking at him with suspicion and reproach—but then, cats looked at everything that way, did they not?
“What I have to present of the citizen Gregor S will contribute little new to the Academy; we can see he was a man, he does not argue the point, I assure you. In fact, he was the worst of all men—a salesman who let his family trample his soul underfoot and never once told them to step lightly, who had no personal pride, which we cats know is paramount in a creature of any sort of worth whatsoever, whose entire ambition was to remain unbothered by his father and to perhaps pay for a few violin lessons for his sister. All this, fellow Academy members, I have observed in his gait, the angle of his tail, the quivering of his whiskers in the night wind. The kitten Gregor S could not lie to me if he tried to, and he did not try—he is not clever enough to try! Even I in my most debased state, I was not soutterly dominated as he—for a memory floats up to me now of having been most cruelly reprimanded by my employer at the bank over some small slight, some mix-up of paperwork that in the larger scheme could not have mattered less but caused my employer to get very red in the face, to yell until he was sweating profusely, and myself to shrink and cower in his presence, for I had then not the soul of a cat and knew no better than to crawl on my belly when another man challenged me. I should have raked a paw across his face and had his ear for breakfast! But men are shallow, mouselike creatures at heart, scurrying in terror here and there rather than standing up and using their teeth for Nature’s intended purpose. The kitten Gregor S had no way out of his life, and yet so entirely prostrate had he become that he did not even seek a way out, nor would he have understood what was meant by the phrase. Now, I fear that you may not understand what I mean by ‘way out.’ I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not say that he had no, nor did he seek, ‘freedom.’ As a cat, we all know this thing, and know that men have no proper notion of it. In fact, may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word
freedom,
which is often bleated by trumpets in their arenas but to which their world provides no road. Cats know freedom; we eat it and drink it, we know it wholly, as a mother or lover. What do men know? And as their poor reflectivemockery of ‘freedom’ is counted among the most sublime feelings in their warped philosophies,
him,”
and Gregor understood quite sharply that it was hewho was meant, “as it does behind me. Yet still he feels a tickle—all of us did, the small kitten and the great old queen alike.”
It caused Gregor Samsa a very great pain in his stomach to hear the tabby refer to a passage back to that life he had had before. He wished nothing so much as to wake up and find it all some horrible phantasm caused by too much dairy, and to hear Josef K idly ruminate on his feeling that it might be done if only he wished it enough caused his heart to bend inward in a bout of bitterness. All the cats seemed to be looking at him with suspicion and reproach—but then, cats looked at everything that way, did they not?
“What I have to present of the citizen Gregor S will contribute little new to the Academy; we can see he was a man, he does not argue the point, I assure you. In fact, he was the worst of all men—a salesman who let his family trample his soul underfoot and never once told them to step lightly, who had no personal pride, which we cats know is paramount in a creature of any sort of worth whatsoever, whose entire ambition was to remain unbothered by his father and to perhaps pay for a few violin lessons for his sister. All this, fellow Academy members, I have observed in his gait, the angle of his tail, the quivering of his whiskers in the night wind. The kitten Gregor S could not lie to me if he tried to, and he did not try—he is not clever enough to try! Even I in my most debased state, I was not soutterly dominated as he—for a memory floats up to me now of having been most cruelly reprimanded by my employer at the bank over some small slight, some mix-up of paperwork that in the larger scheme could not have mattered less but caused my employer to get very red in the face, to yell until he was sweating profusely, and myself to shrink and cower in his presence, for I had then not the soul of a cat and knew no better than to crawl on my belly when another man challenged me. I should have raked a paw across his face and had his ear for breakfast! But men are shallow, mouselike creatures at heart, scurrying in terror here and there rather than standing up and using their teeth for Nature’s intended purpose. The kitten Gregor S had no way out of his life, and yet so entirely prostrate had he become that he did not even seek a way out, nor would he have understood what was meant by the phrase. Now, I fear that you may not understand what I mean by ‘way out.’ I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not say that he had no, nor did he seek, ‘freedom.’ As a cat, we all know this thing, and know that men have no proper notion of it. In fact, may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word
freedom,
which is often bleated by trumpets in their arenas but to which their world provides no road. Cats know freedom; we eat it and drink it, we know it wholly, as a mother or lover. What do men know? And as their poor reflectivemockery of ‘freedom’ is counted among the most sublime feelings in their warped philosophies,
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