The Diaries of Franz Kafka (55 page)

14 July. Isaac denies his wife before Abimelech, as Abraham earlier had denied his wife.

Confusion of the wells in Gerar. Verse repeated.

Jacob’s sins. Esau’s predestination.

A clock strikes gloomily. Listen to it as you enter the house.

15 July. He ran to the woods to look for help, he crossed the first hill almost in a bound, he sped up to the sources of the downward-flowing brooks, he beat the air with his hands, his breath came thickly through his nose and mouth.

19 July.

A singular judicial procedure. The condemned man is stabbed to death in his room by the executioner with no other person present. He is seated at his table finishing a letter in which he writes: O loved ones, O angels, at what height do you hover, unknowing, beyond the reach of my earthly hand –

20 July. A small bird flew out of a near-by chimney, perched on its edge, looked about, soared, and flew away. It is no ordinary bird that flies out of a chimney. From a window on the first floor a girl looked up at the sky, saw the bird’s upward flight, and cried: ‘There it goes, quick, there it goes!’ and two children at once crowded to her side to see the bird.

Have mercy on me, I am sinful in every nook and cranny of my being. But my gifts were not entirely contemptible; I had some small talents, squandered them, unadvised creature that I was, am now near my end just at a time when outwardly everything might at last turn out well for me. Don’t thrust me in among the lost. I know it is my ridiculous love of self that speaks here, ridiculous whether looked at from a distance or close at hand; but, as I am alive, I also have life’s love of self, and if life is not ridiculous its necessary manifestations can’t be either – Poor dialectic!

If I am condemned, then I am not only condemned to die, but also condemned to struggle till I die.

Sunday morning, shortly before I left, you seemed to want to help me. I hoped. Until today a vain hope.

And no matter what my complaint, it is without conviction, even without real suffering; like the anchor of a lost ship, it swings far above the bottom in which it could catch hold.

Let me only have rest at night – childish complaint.

21 July. They called. The weather was fine. We stood up, a mixed lot of people, and assembled in front of the house. The street was silent as it always is in the early morning. A baker’s boy put down his basket and watched us. All of us came running down the stairs at each other’s heels, all the people living on the six floors were mingled indiscriminately together; I myself helped the merchant on the first floor put on the overcoat he had until then been dragging behind him. This merchant was our leader; that was only right, he had more experience of the world than any of us. First he arranged us in an orderly group, admonished the most restive of us to be quiet, took away the hat the
bank clerk insisted on swinging and threw it across the street; each child’s hand was taken by an adult.

22 July. A singular judicial procedure. The condemned man is stabbed to death in his cell by the executioner without any other person being permitted to be present. He is seated at the table finishing a letter or his last meal. A knock is heard, it is the executioner.

‘Are you ready?’ he asks. The content and sequence of his questions and actions are fixed for him by regulation, he cannot depart from it. The condemned man, who at first jumped up, now sits down again and stares straight before him or buries his face in his hands. Having received no reply, the executioner opens his instrument case on the cot, chooses the daggers, and even now attempts to touch up their several edges here and there. It is very dark by now, he sets up a small lantern and lights it. The condemned man furtively turns his head towards the executioner, but shudders when he sees what he is doing, turns away again, and has no desire to see more.

‘Ready,’ the executioner says after a little while.

‘Ready?’ screams the condemned man, jumps up and now, however, looks directly at the executioner. ‘You’re not going to kill me, not going to put me down on the cot and stab me to death, you’re a human being after all, you can execute someone on a scaffold, with assistants and in the presence of magistrates, but not here in this cell, one man killing another!’ And when the executioner, bent over his case, says nothing, the condemned man adds, more quietly: ‘It is impossible.’ And when the executioner even now says nothing, the condemned man goes on to say: ‘This singular judicial procedure was instituted just because it is impossible. The form is to be preserved, but the death penalty is no longer carried out. You will take me to another jail; I shall probably have to stay there a long time, but they will not execute me.’

The executioner loosens a new dagger from its cotton sheath and says: ‘You are probably thinking of those fairy tales in which a servant is commanded to expose a child but does not do so and instead binds him over as apprentice to a shoemaker. Those are fairy tales; this, though, is not a fairy tale’ –

21 August. For the collection: ‘All the beautiful phrases about
transcending nature prove ineffectual in face of the primordial forces of life’ (Essays against Monogamy).

27 August. Final conclusion after two dreadful days and nights: you can thank your official’s vices – weakness, parsimony, vacillation, calculation, caution, etc. – that you haven’t sent F. the card. It is possible that you might not have retracted it, that, I grant, is possible. What would have been the result? Some decisive action on your part, a revival? No. You have acted decisively several times already and nothing was improved by it. Don’t try to explain it; I am sure you can explain the past, down to the last detail, considering that you are too timid to embark upon a future without having it thoroughly explained in advance – which is plainly impossible. What seems a sense of responsibility on your part, and honourable as such, is at the bottom the official’s spirit, childishness, a will broken by your father. Change this for the better, this is what to work at, this is what you can do at once. And that means, not to spare yourself (especially at the expense of a life you love, F.’s), for sparing yourself is impossible; this apparent sparing of yourself has brought you today to the verge of your destruction. It is not only the sparing of yourself so far as concerns F., marriage, children, responsibility, etc.; it is also the sparing of yourself so far as concerns the office you mope about in, the miserable room you don’t stir out of, Everything. Then put a stop to all that. One cannot spare oneself, cannot calculate things in advance. You haven’t the faintest idea of what would be better for you.

Tonight, for example, two considerations of equal strength and value battled in you at the expense of your brain and heart, you were equally worried on both their accounts; hence the impossibility of making calculations. What is left? Never again degrade yourself to the point where you become the battleground of a struggle that goes on with no regard as it were for you, and of which you feel nothing but the terrible blows of the warriors. Rise up, then. Mend your ways, escape officialdom, start seeing what you are instead of calculating what you should become. There is no question of your first task: become a soldier. Give up too those nonsensical comparisons you like to make between yourself and a Flaubert, a Kierkegaard, a Grillparzer. That is simply infantile. As a link in the chain of calculation, they undoubtedly serve
as useful examples – or rather useless examples, for they are part of the whole useless chain of calculation; all by themselves, however, the comparisons are useless right off. Flaubert and Kierkegaard knew very clearly how matters stood with them, were men of decision, did not calculate but acted. But in your case – a perpetual succession of calculations, a monstrous four years’ up and down. The comparison with Grillparzer is valid, perhaps, but you don’t think Grillparzer a proper one to imitate, do you? an unhappy example whom future generations should thank for having suffered for them.

8 October. Förster: Wants the social relations that exist in school life to be made a subject of instruction.

The bringing up of children as a conspiracy on the part of adults. We lure them from their unconstrained rompings into our narrow dwelling by pretences in which we perhaps believe, but not in the sense we pretend. (Who would not like to be a nobleman? Shut the door.)

The incompensable value of giving free rein to one’s vices consists in this, that they rise into view in all their strength and size, even if, in the excitement of indulgence, one catches only a faint glimpse of them. One doesn’t learn to be a sailor by exercising in a puddle, though too much training in a puddle can probably render one unfit to be a sailor.

16 October. Among the four conditions that the Hussites proposed to the Catholics as basis for an agreement, there was one that made all mortal sins – by which they meant ‘gluttony, drunkenness, unchastity, lying, perjury, usury, fee-taking for confessions, and mass’ – punishable by death. One faction even wanted to grant each and every individual the right to exact the death penalty on the spot whenever he saw anyone besmirching himself with one of these sins.

Is it possible that reason and desire first disclose the bare outlines of the future to me, and that I actually move step by step into this same future only under their tugs and blows?

We are permitted to crack that whip, the will, over us with our own hand.

18 October. From a letter to F.:

The matter is not so simple that I can accept without correction what you say of your mother, parents, flowers, the New Year, and the dinner company. You say that for you too it ‘would not be the greatest of pleasures to sit at table at home with your whole family’. Of course, you merely express your own opinion when you say this, and are perfectly right not to consider whether or not it pleases me. Well, it doesn’t please me. But it would certainly please me even less had you written the contrary. Please tell me as plainly as you can in what this unpleasantness consists and what you regard as its reasons. I know that we have already often spoken of the matter from my side, but it is difficult to grasp even a little of the truth of the matter.

Baldly put – hence with a harshness that doesn’t quite correspond to the truth – my position is about as follows: I, who for the most part have been a dependent creature, have an infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things. Rather put on blinkers and go my way to the limit than have the familiar pack mill around me and distract my gaze. For that reason it is easy for every word I say to my parents or they to me to become a stumbling block under my feet. Every relationship that I don’t create or conquer by myself, even though it be in part to my own detriment, is worthless, it hinders my walking, I hate it or am close to hating it. The way is long, my strength is little, there is abundant reason for such hatred. However, I am descended from my parents, am linked to them and my sisters by blood, am sensible of it neither in my everyday affairs nor, as a result of their inevitable familiarity to me, in my special concerns, but at bottom have more respect for it than I realize. Sometimes this bond of blood too is the target of my hatred; the sight of the double bed at home, the used sheets, the nightshirts carefully laid out, can exasperate me to the point of nausea, can turn me inside out; it is as if I had not been definitely born, were continually born anew into the world out of the stale life in that stale room, had constantly to seek confirmation of myself there, were indissolubly joined with all that loathsomeness, in part even if not entirely, at least it still clogs my feet which want to run, they are still stuck fast in the original shapeless pulp. That is how it sometimes is.

But at other times again, I know that they are my parents after all,
indispensable elements of my own being from whom I constantly draw strength, essential parts of me, not only obstacles. At such times I want them to be the best parents one could wish for: if I, in all my viciousness, rudeness, selfishness, and lack of affection, have nevertheless always trembled in front of them (and in fact do so today – such habits aren’t broken), and if they again, Father from one side, Mother from the other, have inevitably almost broken my spirit, then I want them at least to be worthy of their victory. They have cheated me of what is mine and yet, without going insane, I can’t revolt against the law of nature – and so hatred again and only hatred. (At times Ottla seems to me to be what I should want a mother to be: pure, truthful, honest, consistent. Humility and pride, sympathetic understanding and distance, devoting and independence, vision and courage in unerring balance. I mention Ottla because Mother is in her too, though it is impossible to discern.) Very well then, I want them to be worthy of it.

You belong to me, I have made you mine. I can’t believe that there was ever a woman in a fairy tale fought for harder and more desperately than I have fought for you within myself, from the beginning, and always anew, and perhaps forever. You belong to me then, and so my relation to your people is similar to my relation to my own, although incomparably less intense, of course, both for good and for bad. They constitute a tie that hinders me (hinders me even if I should never exchange a word with them), and they are not – in the sense I have used the word above – worthy. I speak as frankly to you as I should to myself; don’t take it amiss or look for arrogance in it, it isn’t there, at least not where you might look for it.