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I’ll never forget that winter night at Christmas break when I read this one, during the transition phase into high school senior year.

What struck me Most the first read-through was the image of the pitched Apple that had pierced and penetrated into the soft, gooey underbelly of this hapless giant caterpillar.

That was so me, back then, in 1967! An outsider at school, my soft belly was routinely pierced by the fierce verbal slurs of the more outgoing members of the collegiate in-crowd.

I formed no alliances at high school except with friends I really loved. A nutty literary nerd.

Ah, those lost teen years!

And Gregor Samsa? How to explain his ugly transmogrification? And whatever can he do next?

First off, his case is a classic of Postructuralism. You see, his raging father (the dreaded Other - and the origin of Gregor’s faceless, Lacanian Dread) has turned Gregor, by the subtle reversal occasioned by his identity crisis, into the brutal and ugly Other itself. His father is no longer the demonic one: Gregor is.

Gregor must have been recently “cured,� and shriven of his acute neurosis, if that sounds familiar, guys! It’s a common medical tool�

But enough armchchair psychotherapy!

Imagine, if you will, a dust- and perhaps carpet-concealed trap door in his fatefully transforming room - leading into his parents� dark basement... (This little story is one possible personal continuation of Gregor’s story in honor of Kafka’s febrile imagination.)

Well, when Gregor the Caterpillar lands on the dark root cellar floor, he gets up, dusts off his damaged exoskeleton, and notices a secret door in the wall that says to him, “open me!�

He does, finding himself in an ancient dark wood. But he doesn’t crawl far, before he is stopped dead in his tracks by three hungry mammals: the in-crowd leaders.

He is trapped.

A spirit guide (his literary hero) then appears and rescues him, telling him he must descend more deeply through these subterranean shadows to find Peace.

He does... All the way down to a first, ultimate revelation in the primordial sludge of Original Sin at the Bottom of his Luck.

And then back, All the Way Up (many months later) to his reward: Stable Peace of Mind.

Such, then, was Kafka’s, Dante’s - and my own quest from the outside in. And all three of us FOUND our peace at the end of it:

Kafka had found Peace when he wrote Amerika.

Dante had found Peace when he wrote Paradiso.

And I?

I found Peace just recently, after following my spirit guide Dante as a minor bit player through a long, battered life.

I meandered woefully through the Hell of otherness.

I stumbled through the Purgatorial cleansing of acting as a working and dutiful husband and breadwinner.

And in the Old Age of Later Retirement Years I know the Peace of a personal practicality, sustained by the Old Rugged Cross:

That has instructed, nourished, and led me safely to the End of my Quest -

A time of New Beginnings -

Fifty Years after falling into the Darkness, as the outsider, Gregor Samsa.