The Diaries of Franz Kafka (37 page)

Wonderful, entirely self-contradictory idea that someone who died at 3 a.m., for instance, immediately thereafter, about dawn, enters into a higher life. What incompatibility there is between the visibly human and everything else! How out of one mystery there always comes a greater one! In the first moment the breath leaves the human calculator. Really one should be afraid to step out of one’s house.

5 December. How furious I am with my mother! I need only begin to talk to her and I am irritated, almost scream.

O. is really suffering and I do not believe that she is suffering, that she is capable of suffering, do not believe it in the face of my knowing better, do not believe it in order not to have to stand by her, which I could not do, for she irritates me too.

Externally I see only little details of F., at least sometimes, so few they may be counted. By these her picture is made clear, pure, original, distinct, and lofty, all at once.

8 December. Artificial constructions in Weiss’s novel. The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience. I want peace, step by step or running, but not calculated leaps by grasshoppers.

9 December. Weiss’s
Galeere
. Weakening of the effect when the end of the story begins. The world is conquered and we have watched it with open eyes. We can therefore quietly turn away and live on.

Hatred of active introspection. Explanations of one’s soul, such as: Yesterday I was so, and for this reason; today I am so, and for this
reason. It is not true, not for this reason and not for that reason, and therefore also not so and so. To put up with oneself calmly, without being precipitate, to live as one must, not to chase one’s tail like a dog.

I fell asleep in the underbush. A noise awakened me. I found in my hands a book in which I had previously been reading. I threw it away and sprang up. It was shortly after midday; in front of the hill on which I stood there lay spread out a great lowland with villages and ponds and uniformly shaped, tall, reed-like hedges between them. I put my hands on my hips, examined everything with my eyes, and at the same time listened to the noise.

10 December. Discoveries have forced themselves on people.

The laughing, boyish, sly, revealing face of the chief inspector, a face that I have never before seen him wear and noticed only today at the moment when I was reading him a report by the director and happened to glance up from it. At the same time he also stuck his right hand into his trouser pocket with a shrug of his shoulder as though he were another person.

It is never possible to take note of and evaluate all the circumstances that influence the mood of the moment, are even at work within it, and Anally are at work in the evaluation, hence it is false to say that I felt resolute yesterday, that I am in despair today. Such differentiations only prove that one desires to influence oneself, and, as far removed from oneself as possible, hidden behind prejudices and fantasies, temporarily to create an artificial life, as sometimes someone in the corner of a tavern, sufficiently concealed behind a small glass of whisky, entirely alone with himself, entertains himself with nothing but false, unprovable imaginings and dreams.

Towards midnight a young man in a tight, pale-grey, checked overcoat sprinkled with snow came down the stairs into the little music hall. He paid his admission at the cashier’s desk behind which a dozing young lady started up and looked straight at him with large, black eyes, and then he stopped for a moment to survey the hall lying three steps below him.

Almost every evening I go to the railway station; today, because it was raining, I walked up and down the hall there for half an hour. The boy who kept eating candy from the slot machine. His reaching into his pocket, out of which he pulls a pile of change, the careless dropping of a coin into the slot, reading the labels while he eats, the dropping of some pieces which he picks up from the dirty floor and sticks right into his mouth. The man, calmly chewing, who is speaking confidentially at the window with a woman, a relative.

11 December. In Toynbee Hall read the beginning of
Michael Kohlhaas
. Complete and utter fiasco. Badly chosen, badly presented, finally swam senselessly around in the text. Model audience. Very small boys in the front row. One of them tries to overcome his innocent boredom by carefully throwing his cap on the floor and then carefully picking it up, and then again, over and over. Since he is too small to accomplish this from his seat, he has to keep sliding off the chair a little. Read wildly and badly and carelessly and unintelligibly. And in the afternoon I was already trembling with eagerness to read, could hardly keep my mouth shut.

No push is really needed, only a withdrawal of the last force placed at my disposal, and I fall into a despair that rips me to pieces. Today, when I imagined that I would certainly be calm during the lecture, I asked myself what sort of calm this would be, on what it would be based, and I could only say that it would merely be a calm for its own sake, an incomprehensible grace, nothing else.

12 December. And in the morning I got up relatively quite fresh.

Yesterday, on my way home, the little boy bundled in grey who was running along beside a group of boys, hitting himself on the thigh, catching hold of another boy with his other hand, and shouting – rather absentmindedly, which I must not forget – ‘
Dnes to bylo docela hezky
’ [‘Very nicely done today’].
⁶²

The freshness with which, after a somewhat altered division of the day, I walked along the street about six o’clock today. Ridiculous observation, when will I get rid of this habit.

I looked closely at myself in the mirror a while ago – though only by artificial light and with the light coming from behind me, so that actually only the down at the edges of my ears was illuminated – and my face, even after fairly close examination, appeared to me better than I know it to be. A clear, well-shaped, almost beautifully outlined face. The black of the hair, the brows and the eye sockets stand livingly forth from the rest of the passive mass. The glance is by no means haggard, there is no trace of that, but neither is it childish, rather unbelievably energetic, but perhaps only because it was observing me, since I was just then observing myself and wanted to frighten myself.

12 December. Yesterday did not fall asleep for a long time. F. B. Finally decided – and with that I fell uncertainly asleep – to ask Weiss to go to her office with a letter, and to write nothing else in this letter other than that I must have news from her or about her and have therefore sent Weiss there so that he might write to me about her. Meanwhile Weiss is sitting beside her desk, waits until she has finished reading the letter, bows, and – since he has no further instructions and it is highly unlikely that he will receive an answer – leaves.

Discussion evening at the officials’ club. I presided. Funny, what sources of self-respect one can draw upon. My introductory sentence: ‘I must begin the discussion this evening with a regret that it is taking place.’ For I was not advised in time and therefore not prepared.

14 December. Lecture by Beerman. Nothing, but presented with a self-satisfaction that is here and there contagious. Girlish face with a goitre. Before almost every sentence the same contraction of muscles in his face as in sneezing. A verse from the Christmas Fair in his newspaper column today.

Quoted Shaw: ‘I am a sedentary, faint-hearted civilian.’

Wrote a letter to F. in the office.

The fright this morning on the way to the office when I met the girl from the seminar who resembles F., for the moment did not know who it was and simply saw that she resembled F., was not F., but had some sort of further relationship to F. beyond that, namely this, that in the seminar, at the sight of her, I thought of F. a great deal.

Now read in Dostoyevsky the passage that reminds me so of my ‘being unhappy’.

When I put my left hand inside my trousers while I was reading and felt the lukewarm upper part of my thigh.

15 December. Letters to Dr Weiss and Uncle Alfred. No telegram came.

Read
Wir Jungen von 1870–1
. Again read with suppressed sobs of the victories and scenes of enthusiasm. To be a father and speak calmly to one’s son. For this, however, one shouldn’t have a little toy hammer in place of a heart.

‘Have you written to your uncle yet?’ my mother asked me, as I had maliciously been expecting for some time. She had long been watching me with concern, for various reasons did not dare in the first place to ask me, and in the second place to ask me in front of my father, and at last, in her concern when she saw that I was about to leave, asked me nevertheless. When I passed behind her chair she looked up from her cards, turned her face to me with a long-vanished, tender motion somehow revived for the moment, and asked me, looking up only furtively, smiling shyly, and already humbled in the asking of the question, before any answer had been received.

16 December. ‘The thundering scream of the seraphim’s delight.’

I sat in the rocking-chair at Weltsch’s, we spoke of the disorder of our lives, he always with a certain confidence (‘One must want the impossible’), I without it, eyeing my fingers with the feeling that I was the representative of my inner emptiness, an emptiness that replaces everything else and is not even very great.

17 December. Letter to W. commissioning him ‘to overflow and yet be only a pot on the cold hearth’.

Lecture by Bergmann, ‘Moses and the Present’. Pure impression – In any event I have nothing to do with it. The truly terrible paths between freedom and slavery cross each other with no guide to the way ahead and accompanied by an immediate obliterating of those paths already traversed. There are a countless number of such paths, or only one, it cannot be determined, for there is no vantage ground from which to observe. There am I. I cannot leave. I have nothing to complain about. I do not suffer excessively, for I do not suffer consistently, it does not pile up, at least I do not feel it for the time being, and the degree of my suffering is far less than the suffering that is perhaps my due.

The silhouette of a man who, his arms half raised at different levels, confronts the thick mist in order to enter it.

The good, strong way in which Judaism separates things. There is room there for a person. One sees oneself better, one judges oneself better.

18 December. I am going to sleep, I am tired. Perhaps it has already been decided there. Many dreams about it.

19 December. Letter from F. Beautiful morning, warmth in my blood.

20 December. No letter.

The effect of a peaceful face, calm speech, especially when exercised by a strange person one hasn’t seen through yet. The voice of God out of a human mouth.

An old man walked through the streets in the mist one winter evening. It was icy cold. The streets were empty. No one passed near him, only now and then he saw in the distance, half concealed by the mist, a tall policeman or a woman in furs or shawls. Nothing troubled him,
he merely intended to visit a friend at whose house he had not been for a long time and who had just now sent a servant girl to ask him to come.

It was long past midnight when there came a soft knock on the door of the room of the merchant Messner. It wasn’t necessary to wake him, he fell asleep only towards morning, and until that time he used to lie awake in bed on his belly, his face pressed into the pillow, his arms extended, and his hands clasped over his head. He had heard the knocking immediately. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. An indistinct murmur, softer than the knocking, replied. ‘The door is open,’ he said, and turned on the electric light. A small, delicate woman in a large grey shawl entered.

2 January. A lot of time well spent with Dr Weiss.

4 January. We had scooped out a hollow in the sand, where we felt quite comfortable. At night we rolled up together inside the hollow, Father covered it over with trunks of trees, scattering underbrush on top, and we were as well protected as we could be from storms and wild beasts. ‘Father,’ we would often call out in fright when it had already grown dark under the tree trunks and Father had still not appeared. But then we would see his feet through a crack, he would slide in beside us, would give each of us a little pat, for it calmed us to feel his hand, and then we would all fall asleep as it were together. In addition to our parents we were five boys and three girls; the hollow was too small for us, but we should have felt afraid if we had not been so close to one another at night.

5 January. Afternoon. Goethe’s father was senile when he died. At the time of his father’s last illness Goethe was working on
Iphigenie
.

‘Take that woman home, she’s drunk,’ some court official said to Goethe about Christiane.

August, a drunkard like his mother, vulgarly ran around with common women. Ottilie, whom he did not love but was made to marry by his father for social reasons.

Wolf, the diplomat and writer.