GREGOR'S QUALITATIVE LEAP
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream.
— Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka [Translated by David Wyllie]
I think of the many occasions in life less important but by no means indifferent to me, when it was a question of making a choice. For although there is only one situation in which either/or has absolute significance, namely, when truth, righteousness and holiness are lined up on one side, and lust and base propensities and obscure passions and perdition on the other; yet, it is always important to choose rightly, even as between things which one may innocently choose, 'it is important to test oneself, lest some day one might have to beat a retreat to the point from which one started, and might have reason to thank God if one had to reproach oneself for nothing worse than a waste of time.
— “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Commposition of Personality;” from Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard [Translated by Walter Lowrie]
Gregor straddles the Edge
at the Abyss, trembling
pebbles & shale shards "underfoot"
on the verge of leaping
or crawling back to the ledge
humiliated & forlorn
villagers below mocking his hump
bellowing "jump, jump!"
Gregor notices a tightrope
spanning the Void to cross --
obscured to those hecklers hurling
potatoes, thorny twigs & acorns
he spies his new body
on the other side, hanging
from a pine tree limb
"THIS IS A DREAM!" Gregor
shouts "ONLY DREAMING!"
& waves his thin insect limbs