Of course, the tuberculosis from which Kafka

suffered all his life, and which killed him in the

end, gives the second half of his dictum a
certain savage poignancy. The distance
between sputum and sanctum, only
accentuated by the assonance, must be
immeasurable; and yet, if this is so, where are
we to live? The cruelty of the paradox is not
that it disparages the world in favor of the
Bible, but that it leaves us no in-between we
might comfortably inhabit. Even so, as any
attentive reader of Kafka knows, the Bible
stands in a subtle continuum with that world of
his whose sordid processes and meticulous
strictures are as perplexing as anything to be
found in Leviticus. On the evidence of his later
journals, Kafka often dwelt, if only in
daydream, in the land of Canaan; in more
prophetic moments, he even saw himself as a
latter-day Moses. Moses was permitted to
behold, but not to enter, that region of milk
and honey; like Moses, Kafka could spy
beneath the spittle-lineaments of this fallen
world a dimension of existence that moved to
the sway of other laws, palpable though
hidden from us.