“You’ve got to fight to keep your legendary love.” – Lou Reed

Franz Kafka said: “I have always been haunted by the feeling that I understand more than others, yet cannot make them understand.”

How a Reader reacts (perhaps, but not really perhaps) to this quotation says everything about who that Reader is.

Such a condition has nothing to do with formal education or monetary status. It has everything to do with the core essential Self.

All can read the quotation on a literal level.

Those who scoff and mock are in a VAST SUPER MAJORITY, while those who ponder and understand are in the tiniest of tiny minorities.

The quotation can be interpreted at least two general ways.

One: It is about the plight of the modern artist, even more now in 2026 than ever before.

Two: It is about the plight of modern humanity (what they used to call “modern man”) in general. That is, ultimately this is about the Universal All in the modern world (the modern world that started in its ultimate beginnings ten or twelve thousand years ago as far as we know it now).

Kafka’s three perhaps greatest works explore this profound, essential, existential condition in a way that few others have ever done.

THE BUG: the man who turns into a literal insect because he is so persecuted by both society at large and the basis for all society, the family.

THE TRIAL: the man who’s punished, ostracized, exiled, and finally murdered by society for absolutely no reason he ever even has time to figure out (he dies as a young man with a kind thrust of a knife into his chest by two strangers).

THE CASTLE: the man who must attain shelter within the Castle or freeze to death outside: and who’s only let in by “them” when it’s already too late.

Kafka’s (so-called fictional) prose visions are not “nightmarish,” they are realistic. They are dreamlike, but they are not fantastical. The world has not always been like this, but the world is like this now.

In the end, everyone is crucified, even Judas.

Dale the Drifter (images provided by Dale the Drifter)