The Diaries of Franz Kafka (61 page)

Sad, and with reason. My sadness depends on this reason. How easy
it was the first time, how difficult now! How helplessly the tyrant looks at me: ‘Is that where you are taking me!’ And yet no peace in spite of everything; the hopes of the morning are buried in the afternoon. It is impossible amicably to come to terms with such a life; surely there has never been anyone who could have done so. When other people approached this boundary – even to have approached it is pitiful enough – they turned back; I cannot. It even seems to me as if I had not come by myself but had been pushed here as a child and then chained to this spot; the consciousness of my misfortune only gradually dawned on me, my misfortune itself was already complete; it needed not a prophetic but merely a penetrating eye to see it.

In the morning I thought: ‘There is a possibility that I could go on living in this fashion, only guard such a way of life against women.’ Guard it against women – why, they are already lurking in the ‘in-this-fashion’.

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me; but that I
was
deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.

Even in the sense of my ‘resolve’ I have a right to despair boundlessly over my situation.

27 January. Spindelmühle. I must be above such mixtures of bad luck and clumsiness on my own part as the mistake with the sledge, the broken trunk, the rickety table, the poor light, the impossibility of having quiet in the hotel during the afternoon, etc. Such superiority cannot be got by not caring, for one cannot remain indifferent to such things; it can only be got by summoning up new strength. Here, indeed, surprises await one, this the most despairing person will allow; experience proves that something can come of nothing, that the coachman and his horses can crawl out of the tumble-down pig-sty.
¹²⁴

My strength crumbling away during the sleigh ride. One cannot make a life for oneself as a tumbler makes a handstand.

The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing
of what is really taking place. This occurs by a higher type of observation, a higher, not a keener type, and the higher it is and the less within reach of the ‘row’, the more independent it becomes, the more obedient to its own laws of motion, the more incalculable, the more joyful, the more ascendant its course.

Despite my having legibly written down my name, despite their having correctly written to me twice already, they have Joseph K.
¹²⁵
down in the directory. Shall I enlighten them, or shall I let them enlighten me?

28 January. A little dizzy, tired from the tobogganing; weapons still exist for me, however seldom I may employ them; it is so hard for me to lay hold of them because I am ignorant of the joys of their use, never learned how when I was a child. It is not only ‘Father’s fault’ that I never learned their use, but also my wanting to disturb the ‘peace’, to upset the balance, and for this reason I could not allow a new person to be born elsewhere while I was bending every effort to bury him here. Of course, in this too there is a question of ‘fault’, for why did I want to quit the world? Because ‘he’ would not let me live in it, in his world. Though indeed I should not judge the matter so precisely, for I am now a citizen of this other world, whose relationship to the ordinary one is the relationship of the wilderness to cultivated land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan); I look back at it like a foreigner, though in this other world as well – it is the paternal heritage I carry with me – I am the most insignificant and timid of all creatures and am able to keep alive thanks only to the special nature of its arrangements; in this world it is possible even for the humblest to be raised to the heights as if with lightning speed, though they can also be crushed forever as if by the weight of the seas. Should I not be thankful despite everything? Was it certain that I should find my way to this world? Could not ‘banishment’ from one side, coming together with rejection from this, have crushed me at the border? Is not Father’s power such that nothing (not I, certainly) could have resisted his decree? It is indeed a kind of Wandering in the Wilderness in reverse that I am undergoing: I think that I am continually skirting the wilderness and am full of childish hopes (particularly as regards women)
that ‘perhaps I shall keep in Canaan after all’ – when all the while I have been decades in the wilderness and these hopes are merely mirages born of despair, especially at those times when I am the wretchedest of creatures in the desert too, and Canaan is perforce my only Promised Land, for no third place exists for mankind.

29 January. Suffered some attacks on the road through the snow in the evening. There are conflicting thoughts always in my head, something like this: My situation in this world would seem to be a dreadful one, alone here in Spindelmühle, on a forsaken road, moreover where one keeps slipping in the snow in the dark, senseless road, moreover, without an earthly goal (to the bridge? Why there? Besides, I didn’t even go that far); I too forsaken in this place (I cannot place a human, personal value on the help the doctor gives me, I haven’t earned it; at bottom the fee is my only relationship to him), incapable of striking up a friendship with anyone, incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together (here in the hotel, indeed, there is little that is cheerful; I won’t go so far as to say that I am the cause of this, in my character, perhaps, as ‘the man with the too-great shadow’, though my shadow in this world
is
too great – with fresh astonishment I observe the capacity for resistance some people have, who, ‘in spite of everything’, want to live under this shadow, directly under it; but there is much more than this to be said on the matter), or especially when I see parents with their children; forsaken, moreover, not only here but in general, even in Prague, my ‘home’, and, what is more, forsaken not by people (that would not be the worst thing, I could run after them as long as I was alive), but rather by myself
vis-à-vis
people, by my strength
vis-à-vis
people; I am fond of lovers but I cannot love, I am too far away, am banished, have – since I am human after all and my roots want nourishment – my proxies ‘down’ (or up) there too, sorry, unsatisfactory comedians who can satisfy me (though indeed they don’t satisfy me at all and it is for this reason that I am so forsaken) only because I get my principal nourishment from other roots in other climes, these roots too are sorry ones, but nevertheless better able to sustain life.

This brings me to the conflict in my thoughts. If things were only as
they seem to be on the road in the snow, it would be dreadful; I should be lost, lost not in the sense of a dreadful future menacing me but in the sense of a present execution. But I live elsewhere; it is only that the attraction of the human world is so immense, in an instant it can make one forget everything. Yet the attraction of my world too is strong; those who love me love me because I am ‘forsaken’ – not, I feel sure, on the principle of a Weissian vacuum, but because they sense that in happy moments I enjoy on another plane the freedom of movement completely lacking to me here.

If M., for example, should suddenly come here, it would be dreadful. Externally, indeed, my situation would at once seem comparatively brighter. I should be esteemed as one human being among others, I should have words spoken to me that were more than merely polite. I should sit at the actors’ table (less erect, it is true, than now, when I am sitting here alone, though even now I am slumped down); outwardly, I should be almost a match in conviviality for Dr H. – yet I should be plunged into a world in which I could not live. It only remains to solve the riddle of why I had fourteen days of happiness in Marienbad, and why, consequently, I might perhaps also be able to be happy here with M. (though of course only after a painful break-down of barriers). But the difficulties would probably be much greater than in Marienbad, my opinions are more rigid, my experience larger. What used to be a dividing-thread is now a wall, or a mountain range, or rather a grave.

30 January. Waiting for pneumonia. Afraid, not so much of the illness, as for and of my mother, my father, the director, and all the others. Here it would seem clear that the two worlds do exist and that I am as ignorant in face of the illness, as detached, as fearful, as, say, in face of a headwaiter. And moreover the division seems to me to be much too definite, dangerous in its definiteness, sad, and too tyrannical. Do I live in the other world, then? Dare I say that?

Someone makes the remark: ‘What do I care about life? It is only on my family’s account that I don’t want to die.’ But it is just the family that is representative of life, and so it is on life’s account that he wants to stay alive. Well, so far as my mother is concerned, this would seem to be the case with me as well, though only lately. But is it
not gratitude and compassion that have brought this change about in me? Yes, gratitude and compassion, because I see how, with what at her age is inexhaustible strength, she bends every effort to compensate me for my isolation from life. But gratitude too is life.

31 January. This would mean that it is on my mother’s account that I am alive. But it cannot be true, for even if I were much more important than I am, I should still be only an emissary of Life, and, if by nothing else, joined to it by this commission.

The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the tiniest step upwards, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security for myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the Negative, not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it. Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won’t tolerate my having the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage bed, for example, even before it has been set up.

1 February. Nothing, merely tired. The happiness of the truck driver, whose every evening is as mine has been today, and even finer. An evening, for example, stretched out on the stove. A man is purer than in the morning; the period before falling wearily asleep is really the time when no ghosts haunt one; they are all dispersed; only as the night advances do they return, in the morning they have all assembled again, even if one cannot recognize them; and now, in a healthy person the daily dispersal of them begins anew.

Looked at with a primitive eye, the real, incontestable truth, a truth marred by no external circumstance (martyrdom, sacrifice of oneself for the sake of another), is only physical pain. Strange that the god of pain was not the chief god of the earliest religions (but first became so in the later ones, perhaps). For each invalid his household god, for the tubercular the god of suffocation. How can one bear his approach if one does not partake of him in advance of the terrible union?

2 February. Struggle on the road to Tannenstein in the morning,
struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B. in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes, his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connexion it occurs to me – but this is already forced – that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.

The ‘struggle’ would probably be horrible if I were to learn a trade.

The Negative having been in all probability greatly strengthened by the ‘struggle’, a decision between insanity and security is imminent.

The happiness of being with people.

3 February. Almost impossible to sleep; plagued by dreams, as if they were being scratched on me, on a stubborn material.

There is a certain failing, a lack in me, that is clear and distinct enough but difficult to describe: it is a compound of timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness; by this I intend to characterize something specific, a group of failings that under a certain aspect constitute one single clearly defined failing (which has nothing to do with such grave vices as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This failing keeps me from going mad, but also from making any headway. Because it keeps me from going mad, I cultivate it; out of fear of madness I sacrifice whatever headway I might make and shall certainly be the loser in the bargain, for no bargains are possible at this level. Provided that drowsiness does not intervene and with its nocturnal-diurnal labour break down every obstacle and clear the road. But in that event I shall be snapped up by madness – for to make headway one must want to, and I did not.

4 February. In the terrible cold, my changed face, the incomprehensible faces of the others.

What M. said, without being able completely to understand the truth of it (there is a type of sad conceit that is wholly justified), about the joy of merely talking with people. How can talking delight anyone but me! Too late, probably, and returning by a queer roundabout way to people.

5 February. Escape them. Any kind of nimble leap. At home beside the lamp in the silent room. Incautious to say this. It calls them out of the woods as if one had lit the lamp to help them find the way.

6 February. The comfort in hearing that someone had served in Paris, Brussels, London, Liverpool, had gone up the Amazon on a Brazilian steamer as far as the Peruvian border, with comparative ease had borne the dreadful sufferings of the winter campaign of the Seven Communities
¹²⁶
because he had been accustomed to hardship since his childhood. The comfort consists not only in the demonstration that such things are possible, but in the pleasure one feels when one realizes that with these achievements on the one level, much at the same time must have necessarily been achieved on the other level, much must have been wrung from clenched fists. It
is
possible, then.

7 February. Shielded and exhausted by K. and H.

8 February. Horribly taken advantage of by both and yet – I surely could not live like that (it is not living, it is a tug-of-war in which the other person keeps straining and winning and yet never pulls me across); I sink into a peaceful numbness, as I did that time with W.