Hannah Arendt's (1961, p. 7) Kafka's parable holds insights for the human condition. The parable involves a traveler that encounters two antagonists on the road, one blocking the road ahead and the other pressing from behind, leaving her caught in the middle in a gap between past and future. The parable highlights the fact that humans often want to sacrifice the future to hold onto the past, and this sacrifice proves to be one that damages their present as well. As Arendt suggests, the individual who has been ideally educated will discover the treasures in the past to forge a future that is both different and better than the past.
Maksymilian T. Del Mar (2009) points out that the person in the middle is there in the scenario along with the antagonist from the past and the one from the present and that the first person "supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back." His comment suggests that the person is a pawn of both future and past and must contend even to stay in one place in the present. This is a powerful insight, considering that most people think of staying in the present as a passive activity. In reality, one will inevitably drift toward whatever time frame is the path of least resistance, and the parable indicates that there is no such path. Whether the individual wants to stay in the present, move forward, or go back, he is being pressed from the opposite direction. Del Mar (2009) states, "His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment-and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet-he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other." His comment shows insight in that the real fight is between past and future, and<...