“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into,”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

A Fable by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s story haunts me, as his stories always have. This one at first seems a simple enough eighty-seven words But while with many writers the ambiguities clarify as you go deeper, with Kafka they always get more complex. The mouse worries about his life having led him into a now inevitable trap. We have a sense of what mouse traps are, and a sense of how our own choices narrow as we age. But is the cat the trap that the mouse sees coming, or is the cat a trap not seen? But the cat is multiple: it’s both the one who knows how the mouse might escape from the trap and it’s the death from which the mouse cannot escape.

If the mouse had changed his direction, would he have escaped the cat? There are two reasons to think so: the cat is in the last chamber, so if the mouse had gone somewhere else he might not have run into the cat. And if the mouse hadn’t been worrying about the walls, worrying about the enormity of the world, he might have had more attention to devote towards worrying about things like cats.

My world too has gotten smaller, or so it seems to me. I struggled today with an internet connection that neither Teksavvy (my ISP, or Internet Service “Provider”) nor Bell Telephone (whose lines Teksavvy uses) are able to fix, though both are able to determine that it’s the other one’s fault, which feels surprisingly like the narrowing of unhelpful walls. A new computer has entered my life, and consequently there are suddenly a large number of computery things that I can no longer do, such print photos in colours with a more than coincidental relationship to the colours on my monitor. My iPad doesn’t like this nouveau computer and refuses to speak to it, or, perhaps, my new computer is too proud of itself to speak to my iPad. And there is the old computer, for which I now must find a new home, which means spending time cleaning it up, erasing four years of data and most of the programs from it, and advertising it, and answering the calls which may come from prospective buyers. All of that takes time, and while in the end I will solve the computer problems, days will have passed, added on to the many days that have already passed, and subtracted from the fewer days that still remain. It seems too many of my days are like this, filled to the brim with busy-ness, with doing things that some part of me feels are vitally important to do, and other parts of me feels are completely useless.

I have more material things in my life than I once did, which is both the prize for a certain degree of success, and the manifestation of the way I have chosen to spend the fruits of that success. But things fall apart. Putting them back together takes time and energy. At some point the amount of time it takes to keep putting the increasing number of things I have back together will be all the time there is. As the Red Queen almost says to Alice, around here it takes all the time you have just to stay in the same place.

Today there was a towel rack that had come off the bathroom door that needed to be put back on. It has been. Surely this is a good thing? Yet the walls have narrowed slightly in the time it took to get the rack on, and to solve the fascinating question of a clamp that no longer quite fitted over the piece that it once had.

I worried when I left teaching that I would find nothing to do to fill my time, and I’d sit around getting stoned and playing video games. Now, I wish I had time to get stoned and play video games, and the problem isn’t that I don’t have things to do, but that the things I have to do are both essential and pointless. Like the mouse, worrying about the walls narrowing, worrying about the trap ahead, I worry that my life needs more discipline, more organization, that there are 119 minor things I need to fix (I didn’t even get to installing the new operating system for my iPad that came out today, though it offers a number of features that I’ve been waiting months for, because I know that when I install it, there will be a host of minor problems with the current programs which will need to be solved in their turn. )

The things on which I spend my days are not computer games, but they are like computer games. A game is something that doesn’t matter, it is doing something easy (putting a ball in a hole) made difficult by an arbitrary set of rules one agrees to (You have to use this little stick and stand 500 yards away, and you only get four shots.) A game is ultimately pointless. No one cares if I made par. Some people do care if Tiger Woods made par, but it still doesn’t change anything. Perhaps the only difference between putting a ball into a golf hole and rolling Sisyphus’ rock up the hill is whether it’s voluntary or not. Solving tech problems sits in between them.

In the great play “Bent”, gay inmates of a concentration camp are told to move a giant pile of rocks from A to B. It is backbreaking work. When they have completed the work, they have to move the rocks from B back to A. Meaningless work is heartbreaking as well as backbreaking. Why worry about how close the walls are getting if all along the cat following you is just working up its appetite?

Parkinson’s first law is “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” If I took on more work, work that perhaps had deeper meaning, the towel racks of the world would probably either get fixed or not without imperiling the planet significantly either way. If the mouse were working at chewing the ropes that held the Gulliverian hero in captivity, or pulling a painful thorn out of the grateful lion’s paw, he probably wouldn’t be running quite so fast towards the cat.

The “big work” I do, the Croft, Tikkun Daily blogging, and Tikkunista may be doing good. It is an act of faith to believe that such work helps to heal the world, helps to make people better writers, gives them insight into things they might not have known otherwise, and thereby enriches their lives. But perhaps I am spoiled by thirty years of instant feedback. In teaching I could see, every day, how what I was doing was effecting change. Now I carefully inscribe words of wisdom onto grains of rice, wrap them into a leaf held together by a thorn, and launch them into the giant river of the internet, hoping that somewhere downstream people who need those messages will get them. Or at least that people who need a meal will get a few grains of rice.

It’s not enough. The walls are getting narrower, and even the towel racks and successful operating systems won’t hold the cats at bay. It’s time to change direction.