by Franz Kafka
6 June. Thursday. Corpus Christi. Two horses in a race, how one lowers its head out of the race and shakes its mane vigorously, then raises its head and only now, apparently feeling better, resumes the race which it has never really interrupted.
I have just read in Flaubert’s letters: ‘My novel is the cliff on which I am hanging, and I know nothing of what is going on in the world’ – Like what I noted down about myself on 9 May.
Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.
7 June. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.
6 July. Monday. Began a little. Am a little sleepy. Also lost among these entirely strange people.49
9 July. Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already. The nervous states are beginning. But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.
The invention of the devil. If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us. His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his face covered with it. If we were possessed by only a single devil, one who had a calm, untroubled view of our whole nature, and freedom to dispose of us at any moment, then that devil would also have enough power to hold us for the length of a human life high above the spirit of God in us, and even to swing us to and fro, so that we should never get to see a glimmer of it and therefore should not be troubled from that quarter. Only a crowd of devils could account for our earthly misfortunes. Why don’t they exterminate one another until only a single one is left, or why don’t they subordinate themselves to one great devil? Either way would be in accord with the diabolical principle of deceiving us as completely as possible. With unity lacking, of what use is the scrupulous attention all the devils pay us? It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not. But we still do not arrive at any state of well-being so long as the many devils are within us.
7 August. Long torment. Finally wrote to Max that I cannot clear up the little pieces that still remain, do not want to force myself to it, and therefore will not publish the book.50
8 August. Completed ‘Confidence Trickster’ more or less satisfactorily. With the last strength of a normal state of mind. Twelve o’clock, how will I be able to sleep?
9 August. The upset night. Yesterday the maid who said to the little boy on the steps, ‘Hold on to my skirt!’
My inspired reading aloud of Der arme Spielmann. The perception in this story of what is manly in Grillparzer. The way he can risk everything and risks nothing, because there is nothing but truth in him already, a truth that even in the face of the contradictory impressions of the moment will justify itself as such when the crucial time arrives. The calm self-possession. The slow pace that neglects nothing. The immediate readiness, when it is needed, not sooner, for long in advance he sees everything that is coming.
10 August. Wrote nothing. Was in the factory and breathed gas in the engine-room for two hours. The energy of the foreman and the stoker before the engine, which for some undiscoverable reason will not start. Miserable factory.
11 August. Nothing, nothing. How much time the publishing of the little book takes from me and how much harmful, ridiculous pride comes from reading old things with an eye to publication. Only that keeps me from writing. And yet in reality I have achieved nothing, the disturbance is the best proof of it. In any event, now, after the publication of the book, I will have to stay away from magazines and reviews even more than before, if I do not wish to be content with just sticking the tips of my fingers into the truth. How immovable I have become! Formerly, if I said only one word that opposed the direction of the moment, I at once flew over to the other side, now I simply look at myself and remain as I am.
14 August. Letter to Rowohlt.
Dear Mr Rowohlt,
I am enclosing the little prose pieces you wanted to see; they will probably be enough to make up a small book. While I was putting them together towards this end, I sometimes had to choose between satisfying my sense of responsibility and an eagerness to have a book among your beautiful books. Certainly I did not in each instance make an entirely clear-cut decision. But now I should naturally be happy if the things pleased you sufficiently to print them. After all, even with the greatest skill and the greatest understanding the bad in them is not discernible at first sight. Isn’t what is most universally individual in writers the fact that each conceals his bad qualities in an entirely different way?
Faithfully –
15 August. Wasted day. Spent sleeping and lying down. Feast of St Mary on the Altstädter Ring. The man with a voice that seemed to come from a hole in the ground. Thought much of – what embarrassment before writing down names – F. B.51 O. has just been reciting poems by Goethe. She chooses them with right feeling. ‘Trost in Tränen’. ‘An Lotte’. ‘An Werther’. ‘An den Mond’.
Again read old diaries instead of keeping away from them. I live as irrationally as is at all possible. And the publication of the thirty-one pages is to blame for everything. Even more to blame, of course, is my weakness, which permits a thing of this sort to influence me. Instead of shaking myself, I sit here and consider how I could express all this as insultingly as possible. But my horrible calm interferes with my inventiveness. I am curious as to how I shall find a way out of this state. I don’t permit others to push me, nor do I know which is ‘the right path’. So what will happen? Have I finally run aground, a great mass in shallow water? In that case, however, I should at least be able to turn my head. That’s what I do, however.
16 August. Nothing, either in the office or at home. Wrote a few pages in the Weimar diary.
This evening the whimpering of my poor mother because I don’t eat.
20 August. Outside my window, across the university building site partly overgrown with weeds, the little boys, both in blue blouses, one in light blue, the other, smaller one in darker blue, are each carrying a bundle of dry hay that fills their arms. They struggle up a slope with it. Charm of it all for the eyes.
This morning the empty open wagon and the large, emaciated horse pulling it. Both, making a final effort to get up a slope, stretched out to an unusual length. Seen at an angle by the spectator. The horse, front legs raised a little, his neck stretched sideways and upwards. Over him the whip of the driver.
If Rowohlt would send it back and I could lock it up again as if it had all never happened, so that I should be only as unhappy as I was before.
Miss F. B. When I arrived at Brod’s on 13 August, she was sitting at the table. I was not at all curious about who she was, but rather took her for granted at once. Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it later turned out, she by no means was. (I alienate myself from her a little by inspecting her so closely. What a state I’m in now, indeed, alienated in general from the whole of everything good, and don’t even believe it yet. If the literary talk at Max’s doesn’t distract me too much, I’ll try to write the story about Blenkelt today. It needn’t be long, but I must hit it off right.) Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin. As I was taking my seat I looked at her closely for the first time, by the time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion.
21 August. Read Lenz incessantly and – such is my state – he restored me to my senses.
The picture of dissatisfaction presented by a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place on which he stands.
30 August. All this time did n
othing. The visit of my uncle from Spain. Last Saturday in the Arco Werfel recited his ‘Lebenslieder’ and ‘Opfer’. A monster! But I looked him in the eye and held it all evening.
It will be hard to rouse me, and yet I am restless. When I lay in bed this afternoon and someone quickly turned a key in the lock, for a moment I had locks all over my body, as though at a fancy-dress ball, and at short intervals a lock was opened or shut here and there.
Questionnaire by the magazine Miroir, about love in the present and the way love has changed since the days of our grandparents. An actress answered: Never did they love as well as today.
How shaken and exalted I was after hearing Werfel! How I behaved afterwards at L.’s party, wild, almost, and without a fault.
This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse (sending the book off to Rowohlt, abscesses, my uncle’s visit). Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy excuses.
4 September. My uncle from Spain. The cut of his coat. The effect of his nearness. The details of his personality. His floating through the ante-room into the toilet, in the course of which he makes no reply to what is said to him. Becomes milder from day to day, if one judges not in terms of a gradual change but by the moments which stand out.
5 September. I ask him: How is one to reconcile the fact that you are generally dissatisfied, as you recently said, and that nevertheless you are at home everywhere, as can be seen time and again (and which is revealed in the rudeness always characteristic of this sort of being-at-home, I thought). He answers, as I remember it: ‘In individual things I am dissatisfied, this doesn’t extend to the whole. I often dine in a little French pension that is very exclusive and expensive. For example, a room for a couple, with meals, costs fifty francs a day. So I sit there between the secretary of the French legation, for example, and a Spanish general of artillery. Opposite me sit a high official of the navy ministry and some count or other. I know them all well by now, sit down in my place, greeting them on all sides, because I am in a peculiar mood I say not another word until the good-bye with which I take my leave. Then I am alone on the street and really can’t see what purpose this evening served. I go home and regret that I didn’t marry. Naturally this mood passes away again, whether because I have thought it through to the end, whether because the thoughts have dispersed. But on occasion it comes back again.’
8 September. Sunday morning. Yesterday a letter to Dr Schiller.
Afternoon. The way my mother, together with a crowd of women, with a very loud voice, is playing with some small children near by and drives me out of the house. Don’t cry! Don’t cry! etc. That’s his! That’s his! etc. Two big people! etc. He doesn’t want to! … But! But! … How did you like Vienna, Dolphi? Was it nice there? … I ask you, just look at his hands!
11 September. The evening of the day before yesterday with Utitz.
A dream: I found myself on a jetty of square-cut stones built far out into the sea. Someone, or even several people, were with me, but my awareness of myself was so strong that I hardly knew more about them than that I was speaking to them. I can remember only the raised knees of someone sitting near me. At first I did not really know where I was, only when once I accidentally stood up did I see on my left and behind me on my right the distant, clearly outlined sea with many battleships lined up in rows and at anchor. On the right New York could be seen, we were in
New York Harbour. The sky was grey, but of a constant brightness. I moved back and forth in my seat, freely exposed to the air on all sides, in order to be able to see everything. In the direction of New York my glance slanted downwards a little, in the direction of the sea it slanted upwards. I now noticed the water rise up near us in high waves on which was borne a great cosmopolitan traffic. I can remember only that instead of the rafts we have, there were long timbers lashed together into gigantic bundles the cut ends of which kept popping out of the water during the voyage, higher or lower, according to the height of the waves, and at the same time kept turning end over end in the water. I sat down, drew up my feet, quivered with pleasure, virtually dug myself into the ground in delight, and said: Really, this is even more interesting than the traffic on a Paris boulevard.
12 September. This evening Dr L. at our house. Another emigrant to Palestine. Is taking his bar examination a year before the end of his clerkship and is leaving (in two weeks) for Palestine with 1,200 K. Will try to get a position with the Palestine Office. All these emigrants to Palestine (Dr B., Dr K.) have downcast eyes, feel blinded by their listeners, fumble around on the table with the tips of their extended fingers, their voices quiver, they smile weakly and prop up these smiles with a little irony. Dr K. told us that his students are chauvinists, have the Maccabees forever in their mouths and want to take after them.
I became aware that I wrote so eagerly and well to Dr Schiller only because Miss B. stopped in Breslau, and I have been thinking about sending flowers to her through Dr Schiller, and although all this was two weeks ago, a trace of it is still in the air.
15 September. Engagement of my sister Valli.
Aus dem Grunde From the pit
der Ermattung of exhaustion
steigen wir we ascend
mit neuen Kräften, with renewed strength –
Dunkle Herren, Dark lords,
welche warten who wait
bis die Kinder until the children
sich entkräften. exhaust themselves.
Love between brother and sister – the repeating of the love between mother and father.
The hollow which the work of genius has burned into our surroundings is a good place into which to put one’s little light. Therefore the inspiration that emanates from genius, the universal inspiration that doesn’t only drive one to imitation.
18 September. H.’s stories yesterday in the office. The stone breaker on the highway who begged a frog from him, held it by the feet, and with three bites swallowed down first the little head, then the rump, and finally the feet – The best way to kill cats, who cling stubbornly to life: Squeeze their throats in a closed door and pull their tails – His horror of vermin. In the army one night he had an itch under his nose, he slapped it in his sleep and crushed something. But the something was a bedbug and he carried the stench of it around with him for days.
Four people ate a well-prepared roast cat, but only three knew what they were eating. After the meal the three began to meow, but the fourth refused to believe it, only when they showed him the bloody skin did he believe it, could not run out fast enough to vomit everything up again, and was very sick for two weeks.
This stone breaker ate nothing but bread and whatever else in the way of fruit or living flesh that he accidentally came upon, and drank nothing but brandy. Slept in the shed of a brickyard. Once H. met him at twilight in the fields. ‘Stand still,’ the man said, ‘or …’ For the sport of it, H. stopped. ‘Give me your cigarette,’ the man went on. H. gave it to him. ‘Give me another one!’ – ‘So you want another one?’ H. asked him, held his gnarled stick in his left hand in case of trouble, and struck him in the face with his right so that he dropped the cigarette. The man ran away at once, cowardly and weak, the way such brandy drinkers are.
Yesterday at B.’s with Dr L. Song about Reb Dovidl, Reb Dovidl of Vassilko is going to Talne today. In a city between Vassilko and Talne they sing it indifferently, in Vassilko weepingly, in Talne happily.
19 September. Comptroller P. tells about the trip which he took in the company of a schoolmate at the age of thirteen with seventy kreuzers in his pocket. How one evening they came to an inn where a huge drinking bout was going on in honour of the mayor who had returned from his military service. More than fifty empty beer bottles were standing on the floor. The whole place was full of pipe smoke. The stench of the beer dregs. The two little boys against the wall. The drunken mayor who, remembering his military service, wants to
maintain discipline everywhere, comes up to them and threatens to have them sent home under arrest as deserters, what he takes them for in spite of all their explanations. The boys tremble, show their Gymnasium identity cards, decline ‘mensa’; a half-drunk teacher looks on without helping them. Without being given any definite decision about their fate they are compelled to join in the drinking, are very pleased to get for nothing so much good beer which, with their limited means, they would never have dared to allow themselves. They drink themselves full and then, late at night, after the last guests have departed, go to sleep on thinly spread straw in this room which had not been aired, and sleep like lords. But at four o’clock a gigantic maid with a broom arrives, says she has no time, and would have swept them out into the morning mist if they had not themselves run away. When the room was cleaned up a little, two large coffee-pots, filled to the brim, were placed on the table for them. But when they stirred their coffee with their spoons, something large, dark, round kept coming to the surface from time to time. They thought it would be explained in time and drank with appetite until, in view of the half-emptied pots and the dark object, they became really worried and asked the maid’s advice. Then it turned out that the black object was old, congealed goose blood which had been left in the pots from yesterday’s feast and on to which the coffee had simply been poured in the stupor of the morning after. At once the boys ran out and vomited everything to the last little drop. Later they were called before the parson who, after a short examination in religion, established that they were honest boys, the cook told to serve them some soup, and then sent them on their way with his spiritual blessing. As pupils in a clerical Gymnasium they had this soup and this blessing given to them in almost every parsonage they came to.
