In Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark, her discussion of Kafka’s frustrating relationship to thresholds, where one is in perpetual limbo and nothing ever happens, set me to pondering my working definition of such a space.  I think of a threshold as brimming with possibility, an in-between space time that is neither all or none nor black or white, but rather both and.  I see it as a place where anything can happen.  And yet, informed by Kafka’s sense of threshold and doorkeeper in his essay “Before the Law,” where God is Law, I understand the power of the doorkeeper.  I also get that in this life with or without the concept of God as Law, we have many gatekeepers.  Admittedly, like Krauss’s narrator, who is also a writer, I often feel perpetually stalled at the gate, frustratingly stuck in the space of in-between. I complete the manuscript, need to move on to the next novel, but continue to tinker with the draft in the hope of finding some edit that will render it worthy, move me beyond the gate.  As one editor told me, “it’s a numbers game” – only so many novels can be published in a year, only so many subjects can be mined.  Of course, it sounds hopeless.  But, here is where Kafka land begins to seem like a tangled thicket or, as Krauss suggests, a “forest dark.”  Without hope that something will happen, what is there?  Without the possibility that anything can happen, what is the point?  The never-ending swirl of hopelessness in the more fatalistic view of threshold would, indeed, render me stuck. Perhaps not for all eternity, but it would put me in peril nevertheless.  For I am a stubborn sort.  I cannot give up trying to pass through the door.  I would argue with St Peter if I thought it would help.