T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E

Someone, at a certain time in my life, must have praised me too highly, W. says; I show all the signs of that. Someone must have told me I excelled, which of course I have, given my education.

Wasn't I happy in my warehouse? Wasn't I content long before I decided to venture into the university? Shouldn't I have stayed there, reading The Castle in my lunch hour? Should I have remained a lunchtime reader of Kafka and the others, rather than venturing into the university?

Of course, as W. knows, I never really read The Castle. He finds the idea of my reading anything particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming the letters as I spoke them out loud, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. – 'It's still an effort for you, isn't it?', W. says.

But in the end, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. - 'They're like totems to you. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

The real reader has no need for surrounding himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? 

But it's different for me, W. says, for whom all books – and particularly the first one for me, Kafka's Castle - are like the obelisk in 2001, making me jump up and down and hoot excitedly.