And those inspired automata, Kafka’s characters, provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions*2 and utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine.

for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs.

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.”