You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

This passage is generally traced to Kafka’s private notebooks/aphoristic jottings from the period of his most intense inward, solitary writing life in Prague, rather than to a published story or novel. It reflects the stance of the writer who, constrained by work, illness, and a fraught relationship to social life, repeatedly imagined creativity and truth as arriving through stillness, withdrawal, and radical attention. The lines circulate in English largely through posthumous editions and translations of Kafka’s notebooks and fragments, where brief, paradoxical “instructions” or meditations appear without narrative framing.

The quote proposes an almost ascetic method of knowing: instead of pursuing the world, one becomes so still that the world is forced to reveal itself. The escalating renunciations—don’t leave, don’t act, don’t even listen, don’t even wait—push toward a state beyond intention, where perception is no longer a grasping for meaning. “Unmasked” suggests truth as disclosure, but the final image (“roll in ecstasy at your feet”) is characteristically Kafkaesque: revelation is at once seductive and unsettling, implying that the world’s surrender may overwhelm the observer. It can be read as a credo for artistic creation, but also as a metaphysical claim about passivity, solitude, and the coercive power of attention.