In his short narrative Erstes Leid, which he (probably) wrote in spring 1922, when he was working on the novel Das Schloss, Franz Kafka created paradigmaticly/parabolicly the problmatic nature of the artistic existence between ideal and reality. The despair of the trapeze artist, who strives for artistic perfection but must recognize the imperfection of his art and thus the fragility of his existence, is shown as the encodement of his experience with boundaries of writing.