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| You wait, as there is nothing else to do. Eventually, someone must leave or someone must enter; eventually the door must open. Mustn't it. No, says beauty. What would be really beautiful here would be if the door never opened, never had opened, never would open, and the poor fellow never knew, thought he was the only one, and wrecked his life trying to get through a sealed door. And then one day he had a revelation of the essential nature of the door, which is not to open, and he became a wise man, a saint, set up a hermitage on the door's stoop, smiled gently and looked wise and gave advice and learned serenity from accepting the Eternal Closure of the Door. And then one day, as the old man was resting on his palisse on the Stoop, dozing in a senile torpor, the door suddenly opened, and the old man, astonished, looked  | through the opening and saw what he had thought he had needed so many years ago, but he didn't know, because he had long forgotten it, and the door, having opened for a time, slowly closed again. Very Kafka, said beauty. I so love Kafka. He even turns frustration into a thing of beauty, into, paradoxically, fulfillment. Fulfillment: the first taste of water after a hot afternoon playing tennis. The thirst measured the fulfillment, the hunger the satisfaction. Fulfillment requires a certain amount of frustration: if only the reverse were true, what a paradise life would be. We would perish from it. Indeed, maybe that's what we perished of. Does in fact fulfillment require a certain amount of frustration? Why else do we continue  | |||
