Life is a trial

Mar 10, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – There are mornings in Georgetown when the light appears to arrive reluctantly, as though the sun itself is unsure whether it wishes to brighten the day’s proceedings. One wakes, stretches, and becomes aware, without quite remembering how, that one has been entered into a trial. There has been no summons, no formal charge sheet, no polite letter informing you of the nature of the offence. Yet the case exists all the same.

This, it seems, is the condition of being alive.

Franz Kafka understood the matter perfectly in The Trial. His unfortunate protagonist, Josef K., awakes one morning to find himself arrested. He asks the obvious question: what is the charge? The answer, delivered with the serene indifference of officialdom everywhere, is that the charge is not the point. The proceedings themselves are the point. The case exists; therefore he must answer to it.

Life, I have long suspected, works in precisely this manner.

None of us filled out the application form for existence. There was no clerk at a celestial counter asking whether we preferred the humid anxieties of the tropics or the grey coldness of northern Europe. No one consulted us on whether we wished to be born into comfort, confusion, or the particular bureaucratic absurdities of our respective homelands. We did not ask to come into the world. We were simply deposited in it, like parcels delivered to the wrong address.

And yet from the moment of arrival the proceedings begin.

The first judges are the parents. They peer into the crib as though inspecting an unfamiliar document, wondering whether it will turn out to be authentic or forged. The child, still unaware of the charges, is already expected to show signs of promise. It must smile at the appropriate moments, walk before the neighbours’ children, speak early, and display evidence of a future usefulness to society. By the time the child reaches school, the tribunal has expanded. Teachers enter the courtroom with red pens, administering verdicts in ink. “Average,” they write with the faint satisfaction of minor magistrates. The charge is still unclear, but the judgement has begun.

Then come the wider courts of the world: employers, acquaintances, the silent jury of strangers. They examine your clothes, your accent, your successes and failures. They do not necessarily know what they are judging, but they judge nonetheless. One senses in their eyes the vague suspicion that something about you may not be entirely in order.

Josef K. believed, at least in the early chapters of Kafka’s novel, that a rational explanation would eventually emerge. Surely, he thought, if one persisted long enough, the machinery of accusation would produce a coherent statement of the offence.

Life is less accommodating.

You may spend years attempting to discover the charge. Some imagine it is failure: failure to acquire sufficient money, status, or respectability. Others suspect it may be moral: that they have somehow failed to live with the required dignity or virtue. There are those who assume the charge is political, social, historical, even cosmic.

But the charge never quite clarifies itself.

Instead, the proceedings continue in a curious mixture of farce and solemnity. People argue passionately about matters that will soon be forgotten. Committees are formed. Resolutions are passed. Careers rise and fall with the gravity of legal appeals, though the ultimate significance of these manoeuvres remains uncertain. Kafka recognised the comedy in this arrangement. Josef K. struggles with admirable determination to defend himself. He consults lawyers who seem to know less about the case than he does. He attends hearings that resemble theatre more than justice. At each stage he becomes more entangled in the process he hoped to escape.

So it is with us.

We construct elaborate explanations for our lives—careers, ideologies, ambitions—believing that these will somehow resolve the case. We imagine that if we accumulate enough achievements, enough certificates of approval, the mysterious court will quietly withdraw the charges.

But the court never quite does.

Instead, it waits, patient and inscrutable, as the years proceed. One gradually realises that the judgement is not delivered in a single dramatic moment. It emerges slowly, through time itself. The body grows tired. Friends disappear. The world rearranges itself without asking your permission.

And then one understands Kafka’s deeper joke.

The trial was never about the charge.

It was about the condition of standing in the dock of existence—of having been placed in a world whose rules were written long before your arrival. You were summoned without consultation, required to participate, and expected to conduct yourself with dignity even though the proceedings were never fully explained.

We did not ask to come into this world.

Yet here we are, defendants in a case that began before we could speak and will conclude without our consent. The sensible response, one suspects, is neither despair nor protest but a certain amused resignation. If we must stand accused, we might as well do so with style. After all, in this vast and curious courtroom called life, everyone is on trial—and no one quite knows the charge.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

• life, Peeping Tom, trial

---