A cage went in search of a bird

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Aphorisms offer distinction that allow us to determine what we see or can’t see, between what is visible or invisible, divisible or indivisible. Without distinctions, we cannot see. But if we insist that our distinctions exist beyond the particular moment of what we’ve seen, we risk transforming them into the bars of a cage which imprison us. In the sequence of aphorisms called HE, Kafka writes: “The din of the world streams out and in through the bars. The prisoner was really free, he could simply have left the cage, the bars were yards apart, he was not even a prisoner.” In the Zűrau sequence, Kafka refines that extended metaphor to a single image: “A cage went in search of a bird.

Daniel Frank foreword to Aphorisms (The Schocken Kafka Library)