I’m willing to bet in high school you had to read one of Franz Kafka’s books. Or, at the very least, you read the SparkNotes of one his books. If not, then what I’m about to write won’t mean too much to you, but hopefully it’ll still mean something.
Anyway, in high school I read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “The Trial,” and at the time I found both books fairly incomprehensible. To summarize them briefly, in the former a man wakes up to find he’s inexplicably turned into a cockroach, and in the latter a man is charged with an unnamed crime and forced to plead his case before an illogical and sinister court.
The two stories are representative of Kafka’s other work in that they are filled with absurdities, anxiety and alienation and are utterly lacking in hope. I found them interesting, but like I said, they didn’t mean much to me in high school.
The thing is, as I inch closer and closer to adulthood, I find they make more and more sense. For example, I too have found myself entangled in a confusing, bizarre and byzantine bureaucracy. And I too have found myself plagued by economic anxiety and an inescapable sense of metaphysical uncertainty.
And I too wake up some mornings and discover that I’ve become a cockroach, damned to be scorned by my most cherished loved ones. Maybe not the last one so much, at least not literally, but definitely the first two.
Who’s to blame for all this?
College, naturally.
I’ve changed since coming to Bradley (or perhaps it’s more apt to say I’ve undergone a metamorphosis) and I am a lot less certain about life. I have started to question the traditions and perceptions I grew up with. For example, the “God thing” stopped adding up for me and I needed a new tent pole for my universe, although I have yet to find one.
Or, for another example, I’ve lost any notion of what I want to do with my life, what trajectory I want it to take. And all these uncertainties come together and form the big question: Who am I?
In college I also learned I am immersed in these disorienting and massive systems (economic, political and cultural) and that, disturbingly, these systems are aware of me. They notice me, but they don’t understand me, and they don’t really care to understand me. They’re too big to be concerned with all my interesting human bits; they just want to integrate me as smoothly as possible. Government, church and, if we’re being real for a moment, Bradley don’t really care much about you or me. I mean, they care about the idea of us (young adults with potential and a future) but not the real us. They’re like a crappy girlfriend or boyfriend in this regard.
But that’s just how it is, I guess. These systems might not care much about you, but you still have to make a life within them somehow. I don’t know how you do it, or how you navigate them, but you have to. And I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with all the questions. Maybe they get answered as you get older or maybe you become confident in your uncertainty and accept the not knowing.
Anyway, this is all to say: you should read Kafka. He’s probably pretty relevant to your life.
