"The gate was always there, and it was made for you."
I have been carrying that sentence around since Wednesday night. It comes near the end of The Trial, Kafka's novel staged in Greek with Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos as the man on trial for something nobody will name, and he is phenomenal in it. So is everyone around him. But it is the sentence I left with.
The play is a man going through the motions inside a system that is slowly killing him. He asks what he is accused of, he tries to understand, he even tries to feel for the people doing it to him. More than once someone points at the exit. He does not take it. That is the part I cannot shake, because it is not that the door is locked. He is waiting for permission, and nobody in that system has the authority to give it, which is exactly how the system keeps him there: with the fear that something terrible happens if you stop waiting and walk.
Freedom inside a system that does not really allow it is a simple idea and a complicated one at the same time, and I think the complication is mostly ours. Nobody is watching the gate as closely as we are. Nobody cares about your life more than you do, and I do not mean that sadly. I mean it is yours, and you should.
I left full, heart and soul, and with one question I am still answering: which door have I been standing in front of, politely, waiting for someone to say now.
Go and see it. Then tell me yours.
If you cannot get to the play, the sentence lives in the book, in the short parable the priest tells near the end, "Before the Law". Kafka's The Trial is in the public domain, and that one page is worth the whole thing.