Near the beginning of The Castle (Das Schloß [written in 1922; published in 1926]), in a passage that, uncharacteristically for Kafka, might not seem out of place in Proust's novel, the surveyor K. compares the church tower of his old hometown with a tower of the Castle in the village where he seeks work. His sympathies go emphatically to the church tower, which, “tapering decisively, without hesitation, straightaway toward the top, capped by a wide roof with red tiles, was an earthly building [“ein irdisches Gebäude”] – what else can we build? – but with a higher goal than the low jumble of houses and with a clearer expression than that of the dull workaday.” By comparison, the battlements of the Castle tower seem to him “irregular, broken, fumbling, as if designed by the trembling or careless hand of a child.” Here the problem of secularization is a question less concerning historical process than the development of the individual, where as adults we can never recover the sanctity that seemed to inhere naturally in the churches of our youth. K. idealizes the church of his own childhood, but finds the Castle tower, source of authority in the village, childish. Yet the very authority of the Castle relies on a mystery and inaccessibility that its employees present as the aura of the sacred; to the people of the village, the Castle is sacred, and K.'s attempts to question it in a secular vein are met with incomprehension.