City dweller

The urban Arab living in Jaffa is relatively less likely than the Arab villager to develop friendly contacts outside the family circle. Villagers tend to spend time with neighbours and friends more than towndwellers whatever their level of education. On the other hand, citydwellers spend more time at the cinema.

Kafka's work is an ellipse with foci that lie far apart and determined on the one hand by mystical experience (which is above all the experience of tradition)⁴ and on the other by the experience of the modern citydweller. When I speak of the experience of the citydweller, I subsume a variety of things under this notion. On the one hand, I speak of the modern citizen, who knows he is at the mercy of vast bureaucratic machinery, whose functioning is streered by authorities who remain nebulous even to the executive organs themselves, let alone the people they deal with. (It is well known that this encompasses one level of meaning in the novels, especially in The Trial.) On the other hand, by modern citydwellers I am speaking of the contemporary of today's physicist.

Leland would not have been able to ignore the fact of cities even if he had not been living in them. He was, however, a citydweller, and, due to his father's business acumen, an upper-middle-class citydweller.