by Franz Kafka
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.
When you are here, sitting at my parents’ table, my vulnerability to what is hostile to me in my father and mother is of course much greater. My connexion with the whole family seems to them to have grown much stronger (but it hasn’t and shouldn’t); I seem to them part of the chain one link of which is the bedroom near by (but I am not); they hope to have found an accomplice in you against my opposition (they haven’t found one); and they appear more ugly and contemptible in my eyes in the degree that I expect more from them under such circumstances.
If all this is as I say, then why don’t I rejoice at your remark? Because I confront my family unceasingly flailing about me in a circle with knives, as it were, in order simultaneously to injure and defend them. Let me be entirely your representative in this, without your representing me in the same sense to your family. Is this too great a sacrifice for you, darling? It is a tremendous one, I know, and will be made easier for you only by the knowledge that my nature is such that I must take it from you by force if you do not voluntarily make me it. But if you do make it, then you have done a great deal for me. I will purposely refrain from writing to you for a day or two so that you can think it over undisturbed by me and give me your reply. A single word – so great is my confidence in you – will serve as answer.
20 October. Two gentlemen in the paddock were discussing a horse whose hindquarters a stable boy was rubbing down. ‘I haven’t,’ said the white-haired elder man, squinting one eye somewhat as he gently gnawed his lower lip, ‘I haven’t seen Atro for a week now, one’s memory for horses is an uncertain thing no matter how much practice one has had. I miss qualities in Atro, now, that I distinctly remember him to have had. It is the total impression I speak of – the details, I am sure, are correct, though I do notice a flabbiness of his muscles here and there. Look here and here.’ His lowered head moved from side to side in scrutiny and his hands groped in the air.109
6 April. Today, in the tiny harbour where save for fishing boats only two ocean-going passenger steamers used to call, a strange boat lay at anchor. A clumsy old craft, rather low and very broad, filthy, as if bilge water had been poured over it, it still seemed to be dripping down the yellowish sides; the masts disproportionately tall, the upper third of the mainmast split; wrinkled, coarse, yellowish-brown sails stretched anyhow between the yards, patched, too weak to stand against the slightest gust of wind.
I gazed in astonishment at it for a time, waited for someone to show himself on deck; no one appeared. A workman sat down beside me on the harbour wall. ‘Whose ship is that?’ I asked; ‘this is the first time I’ve seen it.’
‘It puts in every two or three years,’ the man said, ‘and belongs to the Hunter Gracchus.’
29 July. Court yester. Essay on court jesters.
The great days of the court jesters are probably gone never to return. Everything points in another direction, it cannot be denied. I at least have thoroughly delighted in the institution, even if it should now be lost to mankind.
My place was always far in the rear of the shop, completely in the dark, often you had to guess what it was that you held in your hand; in spite of this every bad stitch brought you a blow from the master.
Our King made no display of pomp; anyone who did not know him from his pictures would never have recognized him as the King. His clothes were badly made, not in our shop, however, of a skimpy material, his coat forever unbuttoned, flapping, and wrinkled, his hat crumpled, clumsy, heavy boots, broad, careless movements of his arms, a strong face with a large, straight, masculine nose, a short moustache, dark, somewhat too sharp eyes, a powerful, well-shaped neck. Once he stopped in passing in the doorway of our shop, put his right hand up against the lintel of the door, and asked, ‘Is Franz here?’ He knew everyone by name. I came out of my dark corner and made my way through the journeymen. ‘Come along,’ he said, after briefly glancing at me. ‘He’s moving into the castle,’ he said to the master.
30 July. Miss K. Coquetry that ill suits the kind of person she is. She spreads, points, pouts her lips as if her fingers were invisibly shaping them. Makes sudden, probably nervous, though controlled movements which always take one by surprise – the way she arranges her skirt over her knees, for instance, or changes her seat. Her conversation contains a minimum of words and ideas, is unassisted by other people, is chiefly produced by turns of her head, gesticulations, various pauses, lively glances; if necessary, by clenching her little fists.
He disengaged himself from their midst. Mist blew about him. A round clearing in the woods. The phoenix in the underbrush. A hand continually making the sign of the cross on an invisible face. A cool, perpetual rain, a changing song, as if from a heaving breast.
A useless person. A friend? If I attempt to summon to mind what those attributes are which he possesses, what remains, even after the most charitable verdict, is only his voice, somewhat deeper than mine. If I cry out, ‘Saved!’ – I mean if I were Robinson Crusoe and cried out, ‘Saved!’ – he would echo it in his deeper voice. If I were Korah and cried out, ‘Lost!’ he would promptly be there with his deeper voice to echo it. One eventually grows weary of perpetually leading this bass fiddler around with one. He himself by no means does this cheerfully, he echoes me only because he must and can do nothing else. Occasionally, during a holiday, when for once I have time to turn my attention to such personal matters, I consult with him, in the garden perhaps, as to how I might get rid of him.
31 July. Sit in a train, forget the fact, and live as if you were at home; but suddenly recollect where you are, feel the onward-rushing power of the train, change into a traveller, take a cap out of your bag, meet your fellow travellers with a more sovereign freedom, with more insistence, let yourself be carried towards your destination by no effort of your own, enjoy it like a child, become a darling of the women, feel the perpetual attraction of the window, always have at least one hand extended on the window sill. Same situation, more precisely stated: Forget that you forgot, change in an instant into a child travelling by itself on an express train around whom the speeding, trembling car materializes in its every fascinating detail as if out of a magician’s hand.
1 August. Dr O.’s stories at the swimming-pool of old Prague. The wild speeches Friederich Adler110 made against the rich during his student days, which everyone
laughed at so; later he made a wealthy match and spoke no more – When Dr O. was a little boy and came from Amschelberg to attend the Gymnasium at Prague, he lived with a Jewish scholar whose wife was a saleswoman in a second-hand clothing store. Meals were brought in from a tavern. At half past five every day, O. was awakened for prayers – He provided for the education of all his younger brothers and sisters; it caused him a great deal of labour but gave him confidence and satisfaction. A certain Dr A., who later became a treasury official and has long been retired (a great egoist); once advised him at that time to go away, hide, simply run away from his family, for otherwise they would be the ruin of him.
I tighten the reins.
2 August. Usually the one whom you are looking for lives next door. This isn’t easy to explain, you must simply accept it as a fact. It is so deeply founded that there is nothing you can do about it, even if you should make an effort to. The reason is that you know nothing of this neighbour you are looking for. That is, you know neither that you are looking for him nor that he lives next door, in which case he very certainly lives next door. You may of course know this as a general fact in your experience; only such knowledge doesn’t matter in the least, even if you expressly keep it forever in mind. I’ll tell you of one such case –
Pascal arranges everything very tidily before God makes his appearance, but there must be a deeper, uneasier scepticism than that of a man cutting himself to bits with – indeed – wonderful knives, but still, with the calm of a butcher. Whence this calm? this confidence with which the knife is wielded? Is God a theatrical triumphal chariot that (granted the toil and despair of the stage-hands) is hauled on to the stage from afar by ropes?
3 August. Once more I screamed at the top of my voice into the world. Then they shoved a gag into my mouth, tied my hands and feet, and blindfolded me. I was rolled back and forth a number of times, I was set upright and knocked down again, this too several times, they jerked at my legs so that I jumped with pain; they let me lie quietly for a moment, but then, taking me by surprise, stabbed deep into me with something sharp, here and there, at random.
For years I have been sitting at the great intersection, but tomorrow, because the new Emperor is arriving, I intend to leave my post. As much on principle as from disinclination, I meddle in nothing that goes on around me. For a long time now I have even stopped begging; old passers-by give me something out of habit, out of loyalty, out of
friendship, and the newcomers follow their example. I have a little basket beside me, and everybody tosses as much as he thinks proper into it. But for that very reason, because I bother with no one and in the tumult and absurdity of the street preserve the calmness of my outlook and the calmness of my soul, I understand better than anyone else everything that concerns me, my position, and what is rightfully my due. There can be no dispute about these questions, here only my opinion is of consequence. And therefore when a policeman, who naturally knows me very well but whom I just as naturally never noticed, halted beside me this morning and said, ‘Tomorrow the Emperor will arrive; see to it that you’re not here tomorrow,’ I replied by asking him, ‘How old are you?’
The term ‘literature’, when uttered in reproach, is a conversational catch-all for so much, that – there was probably some such intention in its usage from the very first – it has gradually become a catch-all for ideas as well; the term deprives one of right perspective and causes the reproach to fall short and wide of its mark.
The alarm trumpets of the void.
A: I want to ask your advice.
B: Why mine?
A: I have confidence in you.
B: Why?
A: I have often seen you at our gatherings. And among us it is ultimately always a matter of gathering together to seek advice. We agree on that, don’t we? No matter what sort of gathering it may be, whether we want to put on theatricals, or drink tea, or raise up spirits, or help the poor, it is always ultimately a matter of seeking advice. So many people with no one to advise them! And even more than would appear, for those who proffer advice at meetings of this kind do so only with their voices, in their hearts they desire to be advised themselves. Their double is always among the listeners, their words are particularly aimed at him. But he, more than anyone else, departs unsatisfied, disgusted, and drags his adviser after him to other meetings and the same game.
B: That’s how it is?
A: Certainly, you see it yourself, don’t you? But there is no particular merit in your discernment; all the world sees it, and its plea is so much more insistent.
5 August. The afternoon in Radešovicz with Oskar. Sad, weak, made frequent efforts to keep track of the main question.
A: Good day.
B: You’ve been here once before? Right?
A: You recognize me? How surprising.
B: Several times already I’ve spoken to you in my thoughts. Now what was it you wanted the last time we met?
A: To ask your advice.
B: Correct. And was I able to give it to you?
A: No. Unfortunately, we couldn’t agree even on how to put the question.
B: So that’s how it was.
A: Yes. It was very unsatisfactory, but only for the moment, after all. One can’t just get at the thing all at once. Couldn’t we repeat the question once again?
B: Of course. Fire away.
A: Well then, my question is –
B: Yes?
A: My wife –
B: Your wife?
A: Yes, of course.
B: I don’t understand. You have a wife?
A: –
6 August.
A: I am not satisfied with you.
B: I won’t ask why. I know.
A: And?
B: I am so powerless. I can change nothing. Shrug my shoulders and screw up my mouth, that’s all; I can’t do more.
A: I’ll take you to my Master. Will you go?
B: I feel ashamed. How will he receive me? Go straight to the Master! It’s not right.
A: Let me bear the responsibility. I’m taking you. Come.
[They go along a corridor. A knocks on a door. A voice calls out, ‘Come in.’ B wants to run away, but A catches hold of him and they enter.]
C: Who is the Master?
A: I thought – At his feet! throw yourself at his feet!
A: No way out, then?
B: I’ve found none.
A: And you’re the one who knows the neighbourhood best of all.
B: Yes.
7 August.
A: You’re always hanging around the door here. Now what do you want?
B: Nothing, thank you.
A: Really! Nothing? Besides, I know you.
B: You must be mistaken.
A: No, no. You are B and went to school here twenty years ago. Yes or no?
B: All right, yes. I didn’t dare introduce myself.
A: You do seem to have grown timid with the years. You weren’t then.
B: Yes, then I wasn’t. I repent me of everything as if I had done it this very hour.
A: You see, everything is paid for in this life.
B: Alas!
A: I told you so.
B: You told me so. But it isn’t so. Things aren’t paid for directly. What does my employer care if I chattered in school. That was no obstacle to my career, no.
The explorer felt too tired to give commands or to do anything. He merely took a handkerchief from his pocket, gestured as if he were dipping it in the distant bucket, pressed it to his brow, and lay down beside the pit. He was found in this position by the two men the Commandant had sent out to fetch him. He jumped up when they spoke to him as if revived. With his hand on his heart he said, ‘I am a cur if I allow that to happen.’ But then he took his own words literally and began to run around on all fours. From time to time, however, he leaped erect, shook the fit off, so to speak, threw his arms around the neck of one of the men, and tearfully exclaimed, ‘Why does all this happen to me!’ and then hurried to hi
s post.111
8 August. And even if everything remained unchanged, the spike was still there, crookedly protruding from his shattered forehead as if it bore witness to some truth.112
As though all this were making the explorer aware that what was still to follow was solely his and the dead man’s affair, he dismissed the soldier and the condemned man with a gesture of his hand; they hesitated, he threw a stone at them, and when they still deliberated, he ran up to them and struck them with his fists.
‘What?’ the explorer suddenly said. Had something been forgotten. A last word? A turn? An adjustment? Who can penetrate the confusion? Damned, miasmal tropical air, what are you doing to me? I don’t know what is happening. My judgement has been left back at home in the north.
‘What?’ the explorer suddenly said. Had something been forgotten? A word? A turn? An adjustment? Very likely. Very probably. A gross error in the calculation, a fundamental misconception, the whole thing is going wrong. But who will set it right? Where is the man who will set it right? Where is the good old miller back home in the north who would stick these two grinning fellows between his millstones?
