The Way Home

"The Way Home" is one of the brief prose pieces in Franz Kafka's first book, Betrachtung (Meditation, 1912). Walking home in the charged stillness after a thunderstorm, the narrator feels himself grow large: the street seems to belong to him, and he surveys his life and prospects with a sudden, buoyant authority.

The spell lasts exactly as long as the walk. As he reaches his building and goes up to his room, the inflated mood thins back into ordinary solitude. In a few sentences Kafka catches the way a passing surge of confidence can feel like mastery and then evaporate the instant one stops moving.