The Trial With No Judge
Josef K. gets arrested one morning. Nobody tells him the charge. He spends the entire book hunting for the court, the document, some official who can explain what he did. There is no such official. The horror of The Trial isn’t that the verdict is unfair. There is no verdict. Just the procedure, running forever.
Most ambitious people are stuck inside that book and have no idea.
You feel arrested. There’s a charge you can’t name. You’re behind. You’re not enough. You’re wasting it. So you go looking for the court. You decide a title is the court. Then a funding round. Then a follower count, an exit, a number. You hand in your papers and the clerk tells you to wait in another room. The judgment never comes. The number arrives and the feeling doesn’t lift, because the feeling was never about the number. There was never a judge. You built the courtroom yourself and then spent your one life trying to win a case in it.
I know this courtroom. When I have a job I feel I’m wasting my potential. When I’m between things I feel I’m not grinding hard enough. Both states are guilty. There is no arrangement of facts that produces innocence, which is the tell. A trial you can’t win by changing the facts was never about the facts.
Kafka’s whole mistake, and he knew it was a mistake, that’s why he bothered writing it down, was to keep believing in the court. Josef K. could have just walked out. He could have said: I don’t recognize this proceeding. No charge, no judge, and I’m not arranging my life around an acquittal nobody is even allowed to grant me.
That’s the move. Don’t win the case. Deny the jurisdiction.
In practice this is boring. It looks like deciding, in advance and in writing, what enough is for a given thing. And then honoring it when you hit it instead of sliding the goalpost the second you arrive. The ship date. The revenue line. The skill. You say the verdict out loud yourself, because no office upstairs is going to hand it to you. Credentials don’t give me value, my thoughts do. Same with acquittals. If I won’t grant my own, no court above me will.
This isn’t contentment. I’m not telling you to want less. I want absurd amounts. But hunger and a haunting are different things. Hunger drives you toward something. The haunting just walks you in a circle through endless corridors, handing your papers to clerks who can’t read, in a building with no exit because you keep refusing to find the door.
Kafka died with the book unfinished, which is the only honest ending it could have had. The trial never concludes. It only stops when you stop showing up.
So stop showing up. Go build the thing for its own sake. There is no judge. There was never going to be. Worst acquittal rate in history. Best news you’ll get all year.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.