Kafka looks at the world as one who has been cast out from it, as someone who must turn back on the way to those places where the emperor resides and the unknown laws are housed. Not as if he had ever found his way to them; rather, he experiences the state of a half-awakened person, whose sleep-laden thoughts are still focused on the recently vanished dream in which the solution to all riddles was present. He still believes he can grasp, even taste, the key word, and yet the incomparably clear figure, to which the world has united under the sign of the open secret, begins to dissolve. In agony, he struggles to capture its disassembled parts, which start to come together in a completely wrong way, and the less successful he is in reconstructing the vanished magnificent image, the more desperately he chases between the ruins.