Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

Intermezzo
Two notes on the influence of Kafka
The Greeks regarded a problem like an apple: peel it, strip away the
outer skin, the inessentials, and you come to the core, the solution.
But life itself is a whole basket of apples. The difficulty is to
recognize the proper apple, to particularize life’s problems. A man
may spend years, indeed a whole lifetime, working through a basket,
hopes rising as he nears the bottom, skins and cores piling up
on all sides, only to realize at last that it is but one of many, there
still await hundreds more baskets of apples, to say nothing of all
the pears, bananas, peaches and oranges that he never thought of.
*
You arise one morning and wish to mail a letter. But the nearest
post office is in a village several miles away. The sun is hot and the
road to the village is over a tortuous rocky way, impassable at this
time of year, beset with all manner of spring floods and other natural
hazards. It is quite impossible, in fact, to reach this village, not
with all the good will in the world nor a complete lifetime to spend
in the journey.
If, however, by some unlikely chance, by some fantastic stretch
of the imagination, and although it has never been known to happen
before, you should eventually come to the village, it would certainly
be after dark and already the post office would have closed
for the night. And if you were to wait until the next morning, although
there are no inns, hotels or guest houses where you could
find shelter for the night, when the temperature falls far below the
level at which anyone has ever been known to survive, you would
find when you presented your letter to the postmaster that there
were no stamps. Indeed, not for many years, and not within the
memory of a living soul in the entire village, have there ever been
any stamps at this post office; and you would have to send to the
nearest town, the road there being even more hazardous and
unlikely of navigation than the way to the village.
But that is only the first step, for application must be made at the
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