by Franz Kafka
To regain my composure after such periods I make a practice of inspecting the burrow, and then, after carrying out the necessary repairs, I frequently leave it, though always for a short spell only. Even on such occasions it seems to me too harsh a punishment to do without the burrow for any length of time, but I recognize that brief excursions are necessary. There is always a certain solemnity about it when I approach the exit. During my periods of home life I steer clear of it, I even avoid entering the last ramifications of the passage that leads to it; it is in any case no easy matter to wander about there, for I have contrived in that area a little mad maze of passages; it was there that my burrow began, and at that time I dared not hope that I would ever be able to complete it in accordance with my plan; I started almost playfully at this corner, and here my first enthusiasm for work ran riot in the construction of a little labyrinth; at the time it seemed to me the crown of all buildings, but today I consider it, probably with more justice, as altogether too trivial a piece of handiwork, not really worthy of the burrow as a whole; it may perhaps be delightful in theory – here is the entrance to my house, I declared in those days ironically to my invisible enemies, and saw them all smother in the labyrinth to a man – but in practice it is a far too flimsy piece of fiddle-faddle that would hardly withstand a serious assault or an enemy fighting desperately for his life. Should I therefore reconstruct this part of my burrow? I keep on postponing the decision, and it will probably remain as it is. Apart from the great labour that I should confront myself with, the task would be the most dangerous imaginable; in those days when I was starting the burrow I could work there in comparative peace, the risks were not much greater than on any other occasion, but today it would mean attracting the whole world’s attention almost wilfully to my burrow, today it is no longer possible. I am almost glad of that; a certain sentimental attachment to this first work of mine cannot be denied. And suppose a serious attack should come, what kind of entrance design could save me? An entrance can deceive, can lead astray, can torment the attacker, and so can my present one at a pinch. But any really serious attack I should have to try and meet immediately with all the resources of the entire burrow, and with all the powers of my body and soul – that is indeed obvious. So this entrance may as well remain as it is. The burrow has so many faults that are imposed on it by nature, it may as well also retain this one fault that my own hands have created and that I now clearly, if belatedly, recognize. All this does not mean to say, however, that this defect does not worry me from time to time, or perhaps always. If on my customary walks I avoid this part of the burrow, that is primarily because I find the sight of it unpleasing, because I don‘t wish to be constantly inspecting a defect in my burrow, however much this defect may go on rumbling at the back of my mind. If that fault up by the entrance must remain there ineradicably, at least I wish to be spared the sight of it for as much of the time as possible. I need only walk in the direction of the entrance and already, even though I am still separated from it by passageways and chambers, I seem to sense an atmosphere of great danger; I sometimes feel as if my coat were growing thin, as if I might soon be left with my bare flesh exposed, and be greeted at that moment by the howls of my enemies. Certainly, such unhealthy feelings are provoked in any case by my departure from the burrow, by my leaving the protection of home behind, and yet it is this entrance labyrinth that torments me most of all. Sometimes I dream that I have reconstructed it, that I have transformed it completely, rapidly, with Herculean strength, in a single night, unobserved by anyone, and that now it is impregnable; the sleep which brings me that dream is the sweetest of all, tears of joy and deliverance still glisten on the hairs of my beard when I awaken.
So whenever I leave the burrow I must surmount the torments of this labyrinth in their physical form as well, and I find it at once irritating and touching when, as sometimes happens, I lose my way for a moment in my own construction; it then seems to me as if this work of mine were still making an effort to prove to me that its existence is justified, despite the fact that my judgement of it has long since been fixed. But then I find myself beneath the moss covering, which I sometimes allow time enough – so rare are the intervals at which I stir from the house – to grow together with the other ground cover of the wood; and now I only need to give a little push with my head and I have ventured abroad. For a long time I do not dare to make that little movement, and if it were not that I should have to master the labyrinth once again I would certainly give up on this occasion and wander back. Just consider. Your house is well protected, self-sufficient. You live in peace, in warmth, you are well-nourished, you are master, sole master of an abundance of passages and chambers; and all this you are prepared, not quite to sacrifice, one hopes, yet in some sense to abandon; you are indeed confident that you will regain it, but still you are letting yourself in for a game that is played for high, for over-high stakes. Can there be any sensible reasons for doing so? No, for that sort of thing there can be no sensible reasons. But all the same I then cautiously raise the trapdoor, and I am outside; cautiously lower it, and race off as fast as I can away from the treacherous spot.
Yet I am not really at liberty; true, I no longer squeeze my way through the passages but instead go chasing through the open woods, I feel new powers in my body for which there was no room, so to speak, in the burrow, not even in the castle keep, had it been ten times bigger; the food also is better outside, the hunting may be more difficult, success more rare, but the results must be rated higher in every respect; I do not deny all this, I can appreciate it and enjoy it at least as much as anyone else, and probably much better; for I do not hunt like some prowler out of thoughtlessness or desperation, but methodically and calmly. Also I am not committed and delivered over to this free life, for I know that my term is measured, that I do not have to hunt here for ever; instead, more or less whenever I wish it and am weary of life here, someone will call me to him whose invitation I shall not be able to withstand. And so I can make the most of my time up here and pass it without any cares; or rather, that is what I could do and yet cannot. My thoughts dwell too much on the burrow. I run off from the entrance fast enough, but now I soon come back again. I seek out a good hiding-place and spy upon the entrance to my house – this time from the outside – for days and nights on end. One may call it foolish, but it gives me inexpressible pleasure; what is more, it reassures me. At such times it is as if I were not so much standing before my house, as before myself while sleeping, and knew the joy of being in a deep slumber and keeping a sharp watch on myself simultaneously. It is in a certain sense my distinction, not only to be able to meet the spectres of the night in the helplessness and blind trust of sleep, but at the same time to confront them in reality as well, with the full powers and the calm judgement of my waking state. And strangely enough I find that my situation is not so bad as I had often thought, and as I will no doubt think again when I descend into my house. In this respect – perhaps in others too, but in this one especially – these excursions of mine are truly indispensable. Despite the care that I took to choose an out-of-the-way spot for the entrance to my burrow – admittedly the overall plan imposed certain restrictions on me here – the amount of traffic that goes by is certainly very considerable, if one adds together the observations made in the course of a week or so; but perhaps that is the case in all inhabited regions, and probably it is actually better to expose oneself to a great weight of traffic, which carries itself past with its own impetus, than to be in total solitude and thus at the mercy of the first slowly exploring intruder who comes along. Here there are plenty of enemies, and even more of their accomplices, but they fight against one another, and while thus employed they go rushing past my burrow on their way. In all this time I have not seen anyone actually investigating the entrance, which is fortunate both for me and for him, for I would certainly have flung myself blindly at his throat in my anxiety for the burrow. It is true that certain folk have come along in whose proximity I dared n
ot stay, and from whom I had to run at the mere hint of their approach in the distance; on their behaviour towards the burrow I am not really in a position to pronounce with certainty, but it is at least reassuring to note that I soon came back, found none of them still present, and the entrance undamaged. There were happy periods when I could almost persuade myself that the world’s hostility towards me might have ceased, or have calmed down, or that the power of the burrow had raised me above the life-and-death struggle in which I had been engaged hitherto. Perhaps the burrow was more of a safeguard to me than I had ever thought or ever dared to think when I was inside it. Things went so far that I sometimes conceived the childish wish never to go back into the burrow at all, to settle down here in the neighbourhood of the entrance, to spend my life observing the entrance, and to find my happiness in ceaselessly reminding myself just how securely my burrow could protect me if I were inside. Well, there soon comes a rough awakening from childish dreams. What exactly does this security which I can observe from here amount to? Can I possibly judge the dangers which beset me in the burrow from the evidence that I collect outside? Can my enemies even get proper scent of me when I am not in my burrow? Some scent of me they must certainly get, but not the full scent. And is it not often the case that the full scent must be available before one can speak of a normal state of danger? So the experiments I am making here are but half-measures, fractional measures, calculated only to reassure me, and by falsely reassuring me to put me in the greatest peril. No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined; rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer wakes. Perhaps he is one of those who saunter casually past the entrance, always making sure, just as I do, that the door is still unharmed and awaiting their attack, and who only pass by because they know that the owner is not at home, or perhaps even because they know that he is lurking innocently in the bushes close by. And I abandon my observation post, I have had enough of this life in the open; it seems to me that I have nothing further to learn here, neither now nor later. And I feel the desire to bid farewell to everything up here, to go down into the burrow and never return again, to let things take their course instead of trying to delay them by useless observations. But now that I have grown so accustomed to seeing everything that happens above ground near the entrance, I find it a great torment to undertake the positively sensational procedure of the descent, without knowing what may be going on all round me behind my back, and then behind the trapdoor after it has been replaced. I first begin the attempt by quickly flinging in the spoils of my hunting, under the cover of stormy nights; that appears to be successful, but whether it has really been successful will only be known after I have climbed down myself; it will be known, but no longer to me, or if it is known to me as well, it will be known too late. So I give up the attempt and do not climb down. I dig an experimental tunnel, far enough away, of course, from the real entrance, a tunnel that is no longer than I am and that is also sealed with a covering of moss. I creep into the tunnel, close it after me, wait there for carefully calculated long or short spells at the different times of the day, then fling off the moss, come out again, and register my observations. I have the most varied experiences, both good and bad, but no general law or infallible method of descent can I discover. I am consequently relieved that I have not yet made my descent down the real entrance, and desperate at the prospect of soon having to do so. I almost reach the point of deciding that I must go right away from here, and resume my desolate life of old, a mode of life which had no security whatever, but which, being one indiscriminate mass of dangers, prevented me from recognizing and fearing each particular danger clearly, as I am constantly being reminded when I compare my secure burrow with the life elsewhere. Certainly such a decision would be an arrant piece of folly, brought on simply by living too long in senseless freedom; the burrow is still mine, I have only to take one step and I am in safety. And I tear myself free from all my doubts and in broad daylight run straight for the door, this time quite determined to open it up; yet I cannot, I rush past it, and fling myself deliberately into a thorn bush, as a punishment, a punishment for I know not what transgression. And at this point I am indeed forced to admit that I was right after all, and that it is really impossible to make the descent without leaving my most precious possession, for a short while at least, freely exposed to all those who surround me, on the ground, in the trees, in the air. And this is no imaginary danger, but a very real one. It need not be exactly an enemy that I provoke into following me, it may just as well be some little innocent or other, some disgusting little female beast that pursues me out of curiosity, and so becomes, without knowing it, the leader of all the world against me; it need not even be that, it may perhaps be – and this is no less bad, in some respects it is the worst of all – it may perhaps be someone of my own kind, a connoisseur and admirer of earthworks, a hermit of the woods, a lover of peace, but all the same a vile scoundrel who wants to lodge where he has not built. If only he were to come along now, if only in his filthy lust he were to discover the entrance, if only he were to set to work raising the moss, if only he were to succeed, if only he were to squeeze nimbly through and were already so far down that I could barely catch a last glimpse of his hindquarters; if only all that were to happen, then at last, freed from all my scruples, I could charge furiously after him and leap upon him, then I could bite him and claw him to pieces, tear him apart and drink his blood, and stuff his carcass straight down to join the rest of my spoils, but above all – this would be the main thing – I should then finally be back in my burrow once more, willing even to admire the labyrinth this time, but first determined to draw the moss covering over me and stretch out, for a rest that might well last for the whole remainder of my life. But nobody does come and I am left to my own resources. Continuously occupied thus with the difficulty of the task, I lose much of my timidity, I no longer even make a pretence of avoiding the entrance, it becomes my favourite pastime to prowl around it in circles; by now it is almost as if I were the enemy and were spying out a suitable opportunity to break in successfully. If only I had someone I could trust, someone whom I could place at my observation post, then I could climb down without any qualms. I would arrange with this trusty confederate that he was to keep a careful watch on the situation during my descent, and for quite a long time afterwards, and to knock on the moss cover if – but only if – he saw any signs of danger. That would make a clean sweep of my difficulties up here; no problem would remain, except possibly that confederate of mine. For is he not likely to demand some service from me in return, will he not at least want to see the burrow? That in itself, letting someone voluntarily into my burrow, would be extremely painful to me; I built it for myself, not for visitors, and I think I would refuse to admit him; even for the sake of being helped back into my burrow, I would not let him in. But I could not let him in anyway, for I should either have to let him go down alone, which is simply unimaginable, or we should both have to descend at the same time, in which case the very advantage he is supposed to bring me, that of keeping a lookout in the rear, would be lost. And what sort of trust can I really put in him? Can someone whom I trust face to face still be trusted just as much when I can’t see him, when we have the moss covering between us? It is comparatively easy to trust someone if one is keeping, or at least can keep, an eye on him at the same time; it is perhaps even possible to trust someone from a distance; but to have, from the inside of the burrow, that is from the inside of another world, complete trust in someone outside, that I believe to be impossible. But it is not even necessary to consider such doubts, it is enough merely to reflect that during or after my descent any one of the countless accidents of existence might prevent my trusted representative from fulfilling his duty, and what incalculable results might it not have for me if he were to encounter even the slightest obstacle? No, if one takes it by and large, I have no cause to complain that I am alone and have nobody that I can trust. I certainly lose no advantage by it and probably spare myself tro
uble. My only trust can be placed in myself and the burrow. I should have thought of that before, and taken measures to meet the difficulty that so preoccupies me now. When I first began the burrow, that would have been at least partly possible. I should have had so to construct the first passage that it had two entrances, adequately spaced, so that after going through all the unavoidable complications of descent by the one entrance I might have rushed along this front passage to the second entrance, slightly raised the moss covering, which would have had to be suitably arranged for the purpose, and tried to keep watch on the position for some days and nights from there. That would have been the only right way of doing it; two entrances do of course double the risk, but I should have had to ignore that objection, especially since the entrance that was intended merely as an observation post could have been quite narrow. And with that I lose myself in a maze of technical speculations, I begin once more to dream my dream of a completely perfect burrow, and that calms me a little; with delight I contemplate behind my closed lids clear or less clear structural devices for enabling me to slip in and out unobserved. As I lie there thinking about it I set great store by these devices, but only as technical achievements, not as real advantages; for this freedom to slip in and out at will, what does it amount to? It is the mark of a restless frame of mind, of inner uncertainty, of disreputable desires, bad qualities that seem still worse alongside the burrow, which stands so firm in its place and can flood one with peace if one is only willing to open oneself to it fully. For the present, however, I am outside it and seeking a possibility of return, and for that the necessary technical devices would be most desirable. Yet perhaps not so desirable as all that. Is one not seriously underrating the burrow if one regards it, in moments of nervous anxiety, as merely the safest possible cavity to creep into for refuge? Certainly it is a safe cavity among other things, or it should be, and when I picture myself in the midst of danger then I wish with all my power, clenching my teeth, that the burrow were nothing but the hole designed for my preservation, and that it should perform this clearly defined task as completely as possible, and I am ready to absolve it from every other duty. But the truth is that in reality – and in times of great emergency one has no eye for reality, and even in threatening times one has first to develop an eye for it – in reality the burrow does provide considerable security, yet by no means enough – for is one ever free from anxieties inside it? These anxieties are different from ordinary ones, prouder, richer in content, often long repressed, but in their ravaging effects they are perhaps much the same as the anxieties that life outside gives rise to. Had I constructed the burrow exclusively to assure my safety I would not exactly have been deceived in the result, but the relation between the enormous amount of labour and the actual security provided, at least in so far as I can be aware of it and in so far as I can profit from it, would not have been a favourable one for me. It is most painful to have to admit that to oneself, but one is forced to do so when one is confronted by that entrance over there, which now positively shuts itself off and clenches itself against me, its own builder and possessor. But the fact is that my burrow is not merely a bolt-hole. When I stand in the castle keep, surrounded by the great piles of my meat supplies, and survey in turn the ten passageways that begin there, each one raised or sunken, straight or curving, growing wider or narrower, as the general plan dictates, and all of them equally still and empty, and ready by their various ways to conduct me to my many chambers, which are also all of them still and empty – then the thought of safety is far from my mind, then I know very well that here is my castle, which I have wrested from the refractory earth with tooth and claw, with pounding and hammering blows, my own castle, which can never by any means belong to another, and is so essentially mine that within it, in the end, I shall even be able to receive the mortal thrust of my enemy undismayed, for my blood will ebb away here in my own soil and will not be lost. And what else but this is the meaning of those blissful hours that I so often spend in my passages, now peacefully sleeping, now cheerfully awake, in these passages which are so exactly designed for me, for comfortable stretchings and childish rollings, for dreamy repose and blessed slumber. And those smaller chambers, each so familiar to me, each of which, though exactly like the next, I can clearly distinguish with my eyes shut by the mere sweep of the wall: they enclose me more peacefully and warmly than any bird is enclosed in its nest. And everything, everything, still and empty.