"The way in which he experienced estrangement was literature, with an intensity greater than that of any other writer of this century, more inexorably than Joyce or Proust or Mann. From this experience flows the power of Kafka’s works to comprehend all forms of alienation, and to suggest a response to political estrangement different from political counterterror: the effort to illuminate this condition by grasping through literature that play is the reward for the courage of accepting death."