[315] images produced by them in our mind, are symbols for a special encounter with reality. The third is symbols^a in drama and novel. Here it is the concentration of figures. Take two of them, the one which all of you know and the other, many of you. The one is Hamlet by Shakespeare^b, which is a symbol in the genuine sense of artistic symbol. He is described as an individual human being who does these things and those things---he can be psychologized and sociologized, and perhaps even biologized [some laughter]---you can do all this with him. But beyond all this, he points to a level of reality in which we can only participate THROUGH HIM. And perhaps this was my very first experience in my life, of art---REAL experience--- when I experienced Hamlet^c as a reality which transcends ANY empirical reality in which I lived, a reality in whom one can participate. And this PARTICIPATION in Hamlet^d was one of the most important encounters with reality I ever had in my life. Now not this individual young

man who doesn't know what he shall do and finally succumbs to this indecision, but that for what he stands, all the realities of life which we encounter in encountering him, in which we participate in a new and revelatory way when we participate in him. Another, Mr. "K" in Kafka^e's Trial, or Castle. "K" stands for Kafka^f, of course, but it is not the individual novelist Kafka^g who has written these two great novels, which I recommend more than anything else in novelistic literature to read, if you want to understand your own deeper levels of life. This man who in The Castle tries to reach the sources of meaning