11 February.  While I read the proofs of "The Judgment,” I'll write down all the relationships which have become clear to me in the story as far as I now remember them.  This is necessary because the story came out of me like a real birth, covered with filth and slime, and only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself and the strength of desire to do so:
 

The friend is the link between father and son, he is their strongest common bond.  Sitting alone at his window, Georg rummages voluptuously in this consciousness of what they have in common, believes he has his father within him, and would be at peace with everything if it were not for a fleeting, sad thoughtfulness.  In the course of the story the father, with the strengthened position that the other, lesser things they share in common give him—love, devotion to the mother, loyalty to her memory, the clientele that he (the father) had been the first to acquire for the business—uses the common bond of the friend to set himself up as Georg's antagonist.  Georg is left with nothing; the bride, who lives in the story only in relation to the friend, that is, to what father and son have in common, is easily driven away by the father since no marriage has yet taken place, and so she cannot penetrate the circle of blood relationship that is drawn around father and son.  What they have in common is built up entirely around the father, Georg can feel it only as something foreign, something that has become independent, that he has never given enough protection, that is exposed to Russian revolutions, and only because he himself has lost everything except his awareness of the father does the judgment, which closes off his father from him completely, have so strong an effect on him.
 

Georg has the same number of letters as Franz.  In Bendemann, “mann” is a strengthening of “Bende” to provide for all the as yet unforeseen possibilities in the story.  But Bende has exactly the same number of letters as Kafka, and the vowel e occurs in the same places as does the vowel a in Kafka.
 

Frieda has as many letters as F[elice] and the same initial, Brandenfeld has the same initial as B[auer], and in the word “Feld” a certain connection in meaning, as well.  Perhaps even the thought of Berlin was not without influence and the recollection of the Mark Brandenburg perhaps had some influence.
 
 

12 February.  In describing the friend I kept thinking of Steuer.  Now when I happened to meet him about three months after I had written the story, he told me that he had become engaged about three months ago.
 

After I read the story at Weltsch's yesterday, old Mr. Weltsch went out and, when he returned after a short time, praised especially the graphic descriptions in the story.  With his arm extended he said, “I see this father before me,” all the time looking directly at the empty chair in which he had been sitting while I was reading.
 

My sister said, “It is our house.”  I was astonished at how mistaken she was in the setting and said, “In that case, then, Father would have to be living in the toilet.”
 
 

28 February.  Ernst Liman arrived in Constantinople on a business trip one rainy autumn morning and, as was his custom—this was the tenth time he was making this trip—without paying attention to anything else, drove through the otherwise empty streets to the hotel at which he always stopped and which he found suited him.  It was almost cool, and drizzling rain blew into the carriage, and, annoyed by the bad weather which had been pursuing him all through his business trip this year, he put up the carriage window and leaned back in a corner to sleep away the fifteen minutes or so of the drive that was before him.  But since the driver took him straight through the business district, he could get no rest, and the shouts of the street vendors, the roping of the heavy wagons, as well as other noises, meaningless on the surface, such as a crowd clapping its hands, disturbed his usually sound sleep.
 

At the end of his drive an unpleasant surprise awaited him.  During the last great fire in Stambul, about which Liman had probably read during his trip, the Hotel Kingston, at which it was his habit to stop, had been burned almost to the ground, but the driver, who of course knew this, had nevertheless carried out his passenger's instructions with complete indifference, and without a word had brought him to the site of the hotel which had burned down.  Now he calmly got down from the box and would even have unloaded Liman's luggage if the latter had not seized him by the shoulder and shaken him, whereupon the driver then let go of the luggage, to be sure, but as slowly and sleepily as if not Liman but his own change of mind had diverted him from it.
 

Part of the ground floor of the hotel was still intact and had been made fairly habitable by being boarded over at the top and sides.  A notice in Turkish and French indicated that the hotel would be rebuilt in a short time as a more beautiful and more modern structure.  Yet the only sign of this was the work of three day laborers, who with shovels and rakes were heaping up the rubble at one side and loading it into a small handbarrow.
 

As it turned out, part of the hotel staff, unemployed because of the fire, was living in these ruins.  A gentleman in a black frock coat and a bright red tie at once came running out when Liman's carriage stopped, told Liman, who sulkily listened to him, the story of the fire, meanwhile twisting the ends of his long, thin beard around his finger and interrupting this only to point out to Liman where the fire started, how it spread, and how finally everything collapsed.  Limam, who had hardly raised his eyes from the ground throughout this whole story and had not let go the handle of the carriage door, was just about to call out to the driver the name of another hotel to which he could drive him when the man in the frock coat, with arms raised, implored him not to go to any other hotel, but to remain loyal to this hotel, where, after all, he had always received satisfaction.  Despite the fact that this was only meaningless talk and no one could remember Liman, just as Liman recognized hardly a single one of the male and female employees he saw in the door and windows, he still asked, as a man to whom his habits were dear, how, then, at the moment, he was to remain loyal to the burned-down hotel.  Now he learned—and involuntarily had to smile at the idea—that beautiful rooms in private homes were available for former guests of this hotel, but only for them, Liman need but say the word and he would be taken to one at once, it was quite near, there would be no time lost and the rate—they wished to oblige and the room was of course only a substitute—was unusually low, even though the food, Viennese cooking, was, if possible, even better and the service even more attentive than in the former Hotel Kingston, which had really been inadequate in some respects.
 

“Thank you,” said Liman, and got into the carriage.  “I shall be in Constantinople only five days, I really can't set myself up in a private home for this short space of time, no, I'm going to a hotel.  Next year, however, when I return and your hotel has been rebuilt, I'll certainly stop only with you.  Excuse me!”  And Liman tried to close the carriage door, the handle of which the representative of the hotel was now holding.  “Sir,” the latter said pleadingly, and looked up at Liman.
 

“Let go!” shouted Liman, shook the door and directed the driver: “To the Hotel Royal.”  But whether it was because the driver did not understand him, whether it was because he was waiting for the door to be closed, in any event he sat on his box like a statue.  In no case however, did the representative of the hotel let go of the door, he even beckoned eagerly to a colleague to rouse himself and come to his aid.  There was some girl he particularly hoped could do something, and he kept calling, “Fini!  Hey, Fini!  Where's Fini?”  The people at the windows and the door had turned towards the inside of the house, they shouted in confusion, one saw them running past the windows, everyone was looking for Fini.
 

The man who was keeping Liman from driving off and whom obviously only hunger gave the courage to behave like this, could have been easily pushed away from the door.  He realized this and did not dare even to look at Liman; but Liman had already had too many unfortunate experiences on his travels not to know how important it is in a foreign country to avoid doing anything that attracts attention, no matter how very much in the right one might be.  He therefore quietly got out of the carriage again, for the time being paid no attention to the man who was holding the door in a convulsive grip, went up to the driver, repeated his instructions, expressly added that he was to drive away from here as fast as he could, then walked up to the man at the door of the carriage, took hold of his hand with an apparently ordinary grip, but secretly squeezed the knuckles so hard that the man almost jumped and was forced to remove his hand from the door handle, shrieking “Fini!” which was at once a command and an outburst of pain.
 

“Here she comes!  Here she comes!” shouts now came from all the windows, and a laughing girl, her hands still held to her hair, which had just been dressed, her head half bowed, came running out of the house towards the carriage.  “Quick!  Into the carriage!  It's pouring,” she cried, grasping Liman by the shoulders and holding her face very close to his.  “I am Fini,” she then said softly, and let her hands move caressingly along his shoulders.
 

They really don't mean so badly by me, Liman said to himself smiling at the girl, too bad that I'm no longer a young fellow and don't permit myself risky adventures.
 

“There must be some mistake, Miss,” he said, and turned towards his carriage; “I neither asked them to call you nor do I intend to drive off with you.”  From inside the carriage he added, “Don't trouble yourself any further.”
 

But Fini had already set one foot on the step and said, her arms crossed over her breast, “Now why won't you let me recommend a place for you to stay?”
 

Tired of the annoyances to which he had already been subjected, Liman leaned out to her and said, “Please don't delay me any longer with useless questions!  I am going to a hotel and that's all.  Take your foot off the step, otherwise you may be hurt.  Go ahead, driver!”
 

“Stop!” the girl shouted, however, and now in earnest tried to swing herself into the carriage.  Liman, shaking his head, stood up and blocked all of the door with his stout body.  The girl tried to push him away, using her head and knees in the attempt, the carriage began to rock on its wretched springs, Liman had no real grip.
 

“And why won't you take me with you?  And why won't you take me with you?” the girl kept repeating.
 

Certainly Liman would have been able to push away the girl without exerting any special force, even though she was strong, if the man in the frock coat, who had remained silent until now as though he had been relieved by Fini, had not now, when he saw Fini waver, hurried over with a bound, supported Fini from behind and tried to push the girl into the carriage by exerting all his strength against Liman's still restrained efforts at defense.  Sensing that he was holding back, she actually forced her way into the carriage, pulled at the door which at the same time was slammed shut from the outside, said, as though to herself, “Well, now,” first hastily straightened her blouse and then, more deliberately, her hair.  “This is unheard of,” said Liman, who had fallen back into his seat, to the girl who was siting opposite him.
 
 

2 May.  It has become very necessary to keep a diary again.  The uncertainty of my thoughts, F., the ruin in the office, the physical impossibility of writing and the inner need for it.

 
Valli walks out through our door behind my brother-in-law who tomorrow will leave for Czortkov for maneuvers.  Remarkable, how much is implied in this following-after of a recognition of marriage as an institution which one has become thoroughly used to.
 

The story of the gardener's daughter who interrupted my work the day before yesterday.  I, who want to cure my neurasthenia through my work, am obliged to hear that the young lady's brother, his name was Jan and he was the actual gardener and presumed successor of old Dvorsky, already even the owner of the flower garden, had poisoned himself because of melancholia two months ago at the age of twenty-eight.  During the summer he felt relatively well despite his solitary nature, since at least he had to have contact with the customers, but during the winter he was entirely withdrawn.  His sweetheart was a clerk—urednice—a girl as melancholy as he.  They often went to the cemetery together.
 

The gigantic Menasse at the Yiddish performance.  Something magical that seized hold of me at his movements in harmony with the music.  I have forgotten what.
 

My stupid laughter today when I told my mother that I am going to Berlin at Whitsuntide.  “Why are you laughing?” said my mother (among several other remarks, one of which was, “Look before you leap,” all of which, however, I warded off with remarks like, “It's nothing,” etc.).  “Because of embarrassment,” I said, and was happy for once to have said something true in this matter.
 

Yesterday met B [his old governess].  Her calmness, contentedness, clarity, and lack of embarrassment, even though in the last two years she has become an old woman, her plumpness—even at that time a burden to her—that will soon have reached the extreme of sterile fatness, her walk has become a sort of rolling or shuffle with the belly thrust, or rather carried, to the fore, and on her chin—at a quick glance only on her chin—hairs now curling out of what used to be down.
 
 

3 May.  The terrible uncertainty of my inner existence.
 

How I unbutton my vest to show Mr. B. my rash.  How I beckon him into another room.
 

The leper and his wife.  The way her behind—she is lying in bed on her belly—keeps rising up with all its ulcers again and again although a guest is present.  The way her husband keeps shouting at her to keep covered.
 

The husband has been struck from behind by a stake—no one knows where it came from—knocked down and pierced.  Lying on the ground with his head raised and his arms stretched out, he laments.  Later he is able to stand up unsteadily for a moment.  He can talk about nothing except how he was struck, and points to the approximate direction from which in his opinion the stake came.  This talk, always the same, is by now tiresome to the wife, particularly since the man is always pointing in another direction.
 
 

4 May.  Always the image of a pork butcher's broad knife that quickly and with mechanical regularity chops into me from the side and cuts off very thin slices which fly off almost like shavings because of the speed of the action.
 

Early one morning, the streets were still empty up and down their length and breadth, a man, he was in his bare feet and wore only a nightshirt and trousers, opened the door of a large tenement on the main street.  He seized the two sections of the door and took a deep breath.  “Misery, oh, damned misery,” he said and looked, apparently calmly, first along the street and then at some houses.
 

Despair from this direction too.  Nowhere a welcome.
 

1. Digestion.  2. Neurasthenia.  3. Rash.  4. Inner insecurity.
 
 

24 May.  Walk with Picker.  In high spirits because I consider “The Stoker” so good.  This evening I read it to my parents, there is no better critic than I when I read to my father, who listens with the most extreme reluctance.  Many shallow passages followed by unfathomable depths.
 
 

5 June.  The inner advantages that mediocre literary works derive from the fact that their authors are still alive and present behind them.  The real sense of growing old.
 

Löwy, story about crossing the frontier.
 
 

21 June.  The anxiety I suffer from all sides.  The examination by the doctor, the way he presses forward against me, I virtually empty myself out and he makes his empty speeches into me, despised and unrefuted.
 

The tremendous world I have in my head.  But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces.  And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it.  That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
 

On a cold spring morning about five o'clock a tall man in a cloak that reached to his feet knocked with his fist against the door of a small hut which stood in a bare, hilly region.  The moon was still white and bright in the sky.  After each blow of his fist he listened, within the hut there was silence.
 
 

1 July.  The wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude.  To be face to face only with myself.  Perhaps I shall have it in Riva.
 

Day before yesterday with Weiss, author of Die Galeere.  Jewish physician, Jew of the kind that is closest to the type of the Western European Jew and to whom one therefore immediately feels close.  The tremendous advantage of Christians who always have and enjoy such feelings of closeness in general intercourse, for instance a Christian Czech among Christian Czechs.
 

The honeymoon couple that came out of the Hotel de Saxe.  In the afternoon.  Dropping the card in the mailbox.  Wrinkled clothing, lazy pace, dreary, tepid afternoon.  Faces scarcely individualized at first sight.
 

The picture of the celebration of the Romanov tercentenary in Yaroslavl on the Volga.  The Tsar, the annoyed princesses standing in the sun, only one—delicate, elderly, indolent, leaning on her parasol—is looking straight ahead.  The heir to the throne on the arm of the huge, bareheaded Cossack.  In another picture, men who had long since passed by are saluting in the distance.
 

The millionaire in the motion picture Slaves of Gold.  Mustn't forget him.  The calmness, the slow movement, conscious of its goal, a faster step when necessary, a shrug of the shoulder.  Rich, spoiled, lulled to sleep, but how he springs up like a servant and searches the room into which he was locked in the forest tavern.
 
 

2 July.  Wept over the report of the trial of twenty-three year old Marie Abraham who, because of poverty and hunger, strangled her not quite nine month old child, Barbara, with a man's tie that she used as a garter.  Very routine story.
 

The fire with which, in the bathroom, I described to my sister a funny motion picture.  Why can I never do that in the presence of strangers?
 

I would never have married a girl with whom I had lived in the same city for a year.
 
 

3 July.  The broadening and heightening of existence through marriage.  Sermon text.  But I almost sense it.
 

When I say something it immediately and finally loses its importance, when I write it down it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.
 

A band of little golden beads around a tanned throat.
 
 

19 July.  Out of a house there stepped four armed men.  Each held a halberd upright before him.  Now and then one of them looked to the rear to see whether he was coming on whose account they were standing here.  It was early in the morning, the street was entirely empty.
 

So what do you want?  Come!—We do not want to.  Leave us!
 

All the inner effort just for this!  That is why the music from the coffeehouse rings so in one's ear.  The stone's throw about which Elsa B. spoke becomes visible.
 

[A woman is sitting at the distaff.  A man pushes the door open with a sword which is sheathed in its scabbard (he is holding it loosely in his hand).]

MAN:  He was here!

WOMAN:  Who?  What do you want?

MAN:  The horse thief.  He is hiding here.  Don't lie!  [He brandishes the sword.]

WOMAN  [raising the distaff to protect herself ]:  No one was here.  Let me alone!
 
 

20 July.  Down on the river lay several boats, fishermen had cast their lines, it was a dreary day.  Some youths, their legs crossed, were leaning against the railing of the dock.
 

When they rose to toast her departure, lifting up their champagne glasses, the dawn had already broken.  Her parents and several wedding guests escorted her to the carriage.
 
 

21 July.  Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.  Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive.  And if they don't then everything is over with here, once and for all.
 

I cannot sleep.  Only dreams, no sleep.  Today, in my dream, I invented a new kind of vehicle for a park slope.  You take a branch, it needn't be very strong, prop it up on the ground at a slight angle, hold one end in your hand, sit down on it side-saddle, then the whole branch naturally rushes down the slope, since you are sitting on the bough you are carried along at full speed, rocking comfortably on the elastic wood.  It is also possible to use the branch to ride up again.  The chief advantage, aside from the simplicity of the whole device, lies in the fact that the branch, thin and flexible as it is, can be lowered or raised as necessary and gets through anywhere, even where a person by himself would get through only with difficulty.
 

To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around one's neck and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last fragments of me when it breaks through the roof tiles, is seen on the roof.
 

Special methods of thinking.  Permeated with emotion.  Everything feels itself to be a thought, even the vaguest feelings (Dostoyevsky).
 

This block and tackle of the inner being.  A small lever is somewhere secretly released, one is hardly aware of it at first, and at once the whole apparatus is in motion.  Subject to an incomprehensible power, as the watch seems subject to time, it creaks here and there, and all the chains clank down their prescribed path one after the other.
 

Summary of all the arguments for and against my marriage:

1.  Inability to endure life alone, which does not imply inability to live, quite the contrary, it is even improbable that I know how to live with anyone, but I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, sleeplessness, the nearness of insanity—I cannot bear all this alone.  I naturally add a “perhaps” to this. The connection with F. will give my existence more strength to resist.
 

2.  Everything immediately gives me pause.  Every joke in the comic paper, what I remember about Flaubert and Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents' beds, laid out for the night, Max’s marriage.  Yesterday my sister said, “All the married people (that we know) are happy, I don't understand it,” this remark too gave me pause, I became afraid again.
 

3.  I must be alone a great deal.  What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.
 

4.  I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul.  Conversations take the importance, the seriousness, the truth of everything I think.
 

5.  The fear of the connection, of passing into the other.  Then I'll never be alone again.
 

6.  In the past, especially, the person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people.  Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.  If through the intermediation of my wife I could be like that in the presence of everyone! But then would it not be at the expense of my writing?  Not that, not that!
 

7.  Alone, I could perhaps some day really give up my job.  Married, it will never be possible.
 
 

In our class, the fifth class of the Amalia Gymnasium, there was a boy named Friedrich Guss whom we all hated very much.  If we came into the classroom early and saw him sitting in his place near the stove we could hardly understand how he could have pulled himself together to come to school again.  But I'm not telling it right.  We didn't hate only him, we hated everyone.  We were a terrible confederacy.  Once, when the District School Inspector was present at a lesson—it was a geography lesson and the professor, his eyes turned to the blackboard or the window like all our professors, was describing the Morea Pennsula—
 

It was the first day of school, evening was already approaching.  The professors of the Obergymnasium were still sitting in the staff room, studying the lists of pupils, preparing new roll books, talking about their vacation trips.
 

Miserable creature that I am!
 

Just whip the horse properly!  Dig the spurs into him slowly, then pull them out with a jerk, but now let them bite into the flesh with all your strength.
 

What an extremity!
 

Were we crazy?  We ran through the park at night swinging branches.
 

I sailed a boat into a small, natural bay.
 

While I was at the Gymnasium, now and then I used to visit a certain Josef Mack, a friend of my dead father.  When, after graduation from the Gymnasium, I—
 

While he was at the Gymnasium Hugo Seifert now and then used to pay a visit to a certain Josef Kiemann, an old bachelor who had been a friend of Hugo's dead father.  The visits suddenly ceased when Hugo, who received the offer of a job abroad which he had to accept at once, left his home town for several years.  When he returned he intended to visit the old man, but he found no opportunity, perhaps such a visit would not have suited his changed views, and although he often went through the street where Kiemann lived and several times even saw him leaning out of the window and was probably noticed by him too, he neglected to pay the visit.
 

Nothing, nothing, nothing.  Weakness, self-destruction, tip of a flame of hell piercing the floor.
 
 

23 July.  With Felix in Rostock.  The bursting sexuality of the women.  Their natural impurity.  The flirtation, senseless for me, with little Lena.  The sight of a stout woman hunched up in a basket chair, one foot curiously pushed backwards, who was sewing something and talking to an old woman, probably an old spinster, whose teeth appeared unusually large on one side of her mouth.  The full-bloodedness and wisdom of the pregnant woman.  Her behind almost faceted by evenly divided planes.  The life on the small terrace.  How I coldly took the little girl on my lap, not at all unhappy about the coolness.
 

How childishly a tinker, seen through the open door of his shop, sits at his work and keeps striking with his hammer.
 

Roskoff, History of the Devil:  Among the present-day Caribs, “he who works at night” is regarded as the creator of the world.
 
 

13 August.  Perhaps everything is now ended and the letter I wrote yesterday was the last one.  That would certainly be the best.  What I shall suffer, what she will suffer—that cannot be compared with the common suffering that would result.  I shall gradually pull myself together, she will marry, that is the only way out among the living.  We cannot beat a path into the rock for the two of us, it is enough that we wept and tortured ourselves for a year.  She will realize this from my last letters.  If not, then I will certainly marry her, for I am too weak to resist her opinion about our common fortune and am unable not to carry out, as far as I can, something she considers possible.
 

Yesterday evening on the Belvedere under the stars.
 
 

14 August.  The opposite has happened.  There were three letters.  The last letter I could not resist.  I love her as far as I am capable of it, but the love lies buried to the point of suffocation under fear and self-reproaches.
 

Conclusion for my case from “The Judgment.”  I am indirectly in her debt for the story.  But Georg goes to pieces because of his fiancée.
 

Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together.  Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only possible way for me to endure marriage.  But she?
 

And despite all this, if we, I and F., had equal rights, if we had the same prospects and possibilities, I would not marry.  But this blind alley into which I have slowly pushed her life makes it an unavoidable duty for me, although its consequences are by no means unpredictable.  Some secret law of human relationship is at work here.
 

I had great difficulty writing the letter to her parents, especially because a first draft, written under particularly unfavorable circumstances, for a long time resisted every change.  Today, nevertheless, I have just about succeeded, at least there is no untruth in it, and after all it is still something that parents can read and understand.
 
 

15 August.  Agonies in bed towards morning.  Saw only solution in jumping out of the window.  My mother came to my bedside and asked whether I had sent off the letter and whether it was my original text.  I said it was the original text, but made even sharper.  She said she does not understand me.  I answered, she most certainly does not understand me, and by no means only in this matter.  Later she asked me if I were going to write to Uncle Alfred, he deserved it.  I asked why he deserved it.  He has telegraphed, he has written, he has your welfare so much at heart.  “These are simply formalities,” I said, “he is a complete stranger to me, he misunderstands me entirely, he does not know what I want and need, I have nothing in common with him.”
 

“So no one understands you,” my mother said, “I suppose I am a stranger to you too, and your father as well.  So we all want only what is bad for you.”
 

“Certainly, you are all strangers to me, we are related only by blood, but that never shows itself.  Of course you don't want what is bad for me.”
 

Through this and several other observations of myself I have come to believe that there are possibilities in my ever-increasing inner decisiveness and conviction which may enable me to pass the test of marriage in spite of everything, and even to steer it in a direction favorable to my development.  Of course, to a certain extent this is a belief that I grasp at when I am already on the window sill.
 

I'll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility.  Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one.
 

The man with the dark, stern eyes who was carrying the pile of old coats on his shoulder.
 

LEOPOLD S.  [a tall, strong man, clumsy, jerky movements, loosely hanging, wrinkled, checked clothes, enters hurriedly through the door on the right into the large room, claps his hands, and shouts]:  Felice! Felice!  [Without pausing an instant for a reply to his shout he hurries to the middle door which he opens, again shouting]  Felice!

FBLICE S.  [enters through the door at the left, stops at the door, a forty year old woman in a kitchen apron]:  Here I am, Leo.  How nervous you have become recently!  What is it you want?

LEOPOLD  [turns with a jerk, then stops and bites his lips]:  Well, then, come over here!  [He walks over to the sofa.]

FELICE  [does not move]:  Quick!  What do you want?  I really have to go back to the kitchen.

LEOPOLD  [from the sofa]:  Forget the kitchen!  Come here!  I want to tell you something important.  It will make up for it.  All right, come on!

FELICE  [walks towards him slowly, raising the shoulder straps of her apron]:  Well, what is it that's so important?  If you're making a fool of me I'll be angry, seriously.  [Stops in front of him.]

LEOPOLD:  Well, sit down, then.

FELICE:  And suppose I don't want to?

LEOPOLD:  Then I can't tell it to you.  I must have you close to me.

FELICE:  All right, now I am sitting.
 
 

21 August.  Today I got Kierkegaard’s Buch des Richters.  As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world.  He bears me out like a friend.  I drafted the following letter to her father, which, if I have the strength, I will send off tomorrow.
 

You hesitate to amswer my request, that is quite understandable, every father would do the same in the case of any suitor.  Hence your hesitation is not the reason for this letter, at most it increases my hope for a calm and correct judgment of it.  I am writing this letter because I fear that your hesitation or your considerations are caused by more general reflections, rather than by that single passage in my first letter which indeed makes them necessary and which might have given me away.  That is the passage concerning the unbearableness of my job.

You will perhaps pass over what I say, but you shouldn't, you should rather inquire into it very carefully, in which case I should carefully and briefly have to answer you as follows.  My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature.  Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.  Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause, and this year of worry and torment about my and your daughter's future has revealed to the full my inability to resist.  You might ask why I do not give up this job and—I have no money—do not try to support myself by literary work.  To this I can make only the miserable reply that I don't have the strength for it, and that, as far as I can see, I shall instead be destroyed by this job, and destroyed quickly.

And now compare me to your daughter, this healthy, gay, natural, strong girl.  As often as I have repeated it to her in perhaps five hundred letters, and as often as she has calmed me with a “no” that to be sure has no very convincing basis—it nevertheless remains true that she must be unhappy with me, so far as I can see.  I am, not only because of my external circumstances but even much more because of my essential nature, a reserved, silent, unsocial, dissatisfied person, but without being able to call this my misfortune, for it is only the reflection of my goal.  Conclusions can at least be drawn from the sort of life I lead at home.  Well, I live in my family, among the best and most lovable people, more strange than a stranger.  I have not spoken an average of twenty words a day to my mother these last years, hardly ever said more than hello to my father.  I do not speak at all to my married sisters and my brothers-in-law, and not because I have anything against them.  The reason for it is simply this, that I have not the slightest thing to talk to them about.  Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because I think it does.  I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer.  I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

A marriage could not change me, just as my job cannot change me.
 
 

30 August.  Where am I to find salvation?  How many untruths I no longer even knew about will be brought to the surface.  If they are going to pervade our marriage as they pervaded the good-bye, then I have certainly done the right thing.  In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies.  The limited circle is pure.
 
 

14 October.  The little street began with the wall of a graveyard on the one side and a low house with a balcony on the other.  In the house lived the pensioned official, Friedrich Munch, and his sister, Elizabeth.
 

A herd of horses broke out of the enclosure.
 

Two friends went for a morning ride.
 

“Devils, save me from this benightedness!” shouted an old merchant who had wearily lain down on the sofa in the evening and now, in the night, got up with difficulty only by calling upon all his strength.  There was a hollow knock at the door.  “Come in, come in, everything that is outside!” he shouted.
 
 

15 October.  Perhaps I have caught hold of myself again, perhaps I secretly took the shorter way again, and now I, who already despair in loneliness, have pulled myself up again.  But the headaches, the sleeplessness!  Well, it is worth the struggle, or rather, I have no choice.
 

The stay in Riva was very important to me.  For the first time I understood a Christian girl and lived almost entirely within the sphere of her influence.  I am incapable of writing down the important things that I need to remember.  This weakness of mine makes my dull head clear and empty only in order to preserve itself, but only insofar as the confusion lets itself be crowded off to the periphery.  But I almost prefer this condition to the merely dull and indefinite pressure the uncertain release from which first would require a hammer to crush me.
 

Unsuccessful attempt to write to E. Weiss.  And yesterday, in bed, the letter was boiling in my head.
 

To sit in the corner of a tram, your coat wrapped around you.
 

Prof. G. on the trip from Riva.  His German-Bohemian nose reminding one of death, swollen, flushed, pimpled cheeks set on the bloodless leanness of his face, the blond, full beard around it.  Possessed by a voracious appetite and thirst.  The gulping down of the hot soup, the biting into and at the same time the licking of the unskinned heel of salami, the solemn gulps of the beer grown warm, the sweat breaking out around his nose.  A loathsomeness that cannot be savored to the full even by the greediest staring and sniffing.
 

The house was already locked up.  There was light in two windows on the second floor, and in one window on the fourth floor as well.  A carriage stopped before the house.  A young man stepped to the lighted window on the fourth floor, opened it, and looked down into the street.  In the moonlight.
 

It was already late in the evening.  The student had lost all desire to continue working.  Nor was it at all necessary, he had really made great progress the last few weeks, he could probably relax a little and reduce the amount of work he did at night.  He closed his books and notebooks, arranged everything on his little table, and was about to undress and go to sleep.  By accident, however, he looked towards the window, and when he saw the bright full moon it occurred to him that he might still take a short walk in the beautiful autumn night and somewhere or other, perhaps, refresh himself with a cup of black coffee.  He turned out the lamp, took his hat, and opened the door to the kitchen.  Usually it did not matter to him at all that he always had to go through the kitchen, this inconvenience also considerably reduced the rent of his room, but now and then, when there was an unusual amount of noise in the kitchen, or when, as today, he wanted to go out late in the evening, it was annoying.
 

In despair.  Today, in the half-asleep during the afternoon: in the end the pain will really burst my head.  And at the temples.  What I saw when I pictured this to myself was really a gunshot wound, but around the hole the jagged edges were bent straight back, as in the case of a tin can violently torn open.
 

Don't forget Kropotkin!
 
 

20 October.  The unimaginable sadness in the morning.  In the evening read Jacobsohn's Der Fall Jacobsohn.  This strength to live, to make decisions, joyfully to set one's foot in the right place.  He sits in himself the way a practiced rower sits in his boat and would sit in any boat.  I wanted to write to him.
 

Instead of which I went for a walk, erased all the emotion I had absorbed in a conversation with Haas, whom I had run into, women excited me, I am now reading “The Metamorphosis” at home and find it bad.  Perhaps I am really lost, the sadness of this morning will return again, I shall not be able to resist it for long, it deprives me of all hope.  I don't even have the desire to keep a diary, perhaps because there is already too much lacking in it, perhaps because I should perpetually have to describe incomplete—by all appearances necessarily incomplete—actions, perhaps because writing itself adds to my sadness.
 

I would gladly write fairy tales (why do I hate the word so?) that could please W. [Gerti Wasner, the girl he met in Riva] and that she might sometimes keep under the table at meals, read between courses, and blush fearfully when she noticed that the sanatorium doctor has been standing behind her for a little while now and watching her.  Her excitement sometimes—or really all of the time—when she hears stories.
 

I notice that I am afraid of the almost physical strain of the effort to remember, afraid of the pain beneath which the floor of the thoughtless vacuum of the mind slowly opens up, or even merely heaves up a little in preparation.  All things resist being written down.  If I knew that her commandment not to mention her were at work here (I have kept it faithfully, almost without effort), then I should be satisfied, but it is nothing but inability.  Besides, what am I to think of the fact that this evening, for a long while, I was pondering what the acquaintance with W. had cost me in pleasures with the Russian woman, who at night perhaps (this is by no means impossible) might have let me into her room, which was diagonally across from mine.  While my evening's intercourse with W. was carried on in a language of knocks whose meaning we never definitely agreed upon.  I knocked on the ceiling of my room below hers, received her answer, leaned out of the window, greeted her, once let myself be blessed by her, once snatched at a ribbon she let down, sat on the window sill for hours, heard every one of her steps above, mistakenly regarded every chance knock to be the sign of an understanding, heard her coughing, her singing before she fell asleep.
 
 

21 October.  Lost day.  Visit to the Ringhoffer factory, Ehrenfels's seminar, at Weltsch's, dinner, walk, now here at ten o'clock.  I keep thinking of the black beetle, but will not write.
 

In the small harbor of a fishing village a barque was being fitted out for a voyage.  A young man in wide sailor-trousers was supervising the work.  Two old sailors were carrying sacks and chests to a gangplank where a tall man, his legs spread wide, took everything and handed it over into hands that stretched towards him from the dark interior of the barque.  On the large, square-hewn stones enclosing a corner of the dock, half-reclining, sat five men, they blew the smoke of their pipes in all directions.  From time to time the man in the wide sailor-trousers went up to them, made a little speech, and slapped them on the knees.  Usually a wine jug was brought out from behind a stone in whose shade it was kept, and a glass of opaque red wine passed from man to man.
 
 

22 October.  Too late.  The sweetness of sorrow and of love.  To be smiled at by her in the boat.  That was most beautiful of all.  Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.
 

Yesterday's observation.  The most appropriate situation for me: To listen to a conversation between two people who are discussing a matter that concerns them closely while I have only a very remote interest in it which is in addition completely selfless.
 
 

26 October.  The family sat at dinner.  Through the uncurtained windows one could look out into the tropic night.
 

“Who am I, then?” I rebuked myself.  I got up from the sofa upon which I had been lying with my knees drawn up, and sat erect.  The door, which led straight from the stairway into my room, opened and a young man with a bowed head and searching eyes entered.  He walked, as far as this was possible in the narrow room, in a curve around the sofa and stopped in the darkness of the corner near the window.  I wanted to see what kind of apparition this was, went over, and grasped the man by the arm.  He was a living person.  He looked up—a little shorter than I—at me with a smile, the very carelessness with which he nodded and said “Just try me” should have convinced me.  Despite that, I seized him in from by the waistcoat and at the back by the jacket and shook him.  His beautiful, strong, gold watch-chain attracted my attention, I grabbed it and pulled down on it so that the buttonhole to which it was fastened tore.  He put up with this, simply looked down at the damage, tried in vain to keep the waistcoat button in the torn buttonhole.  “What are you doing?” he said finally, and showed me the waistcoat.  “Just be quiet!” I said threateningly.
 

I began to run round the room, from a walk I passed into a trot, from a trot into a gallop, every time I passed the man I raised my fist to him.  He did not even look at me but worked on his vest.  I felt very free, even my breathing was extraordinary, my breast felt that only my clothes prevented it from heaving gigantically.
 

For many months Wilhelm Menz, a bookkeeper, had been intending to accost a girl whom he used regularly to meet on the way to the office in the morning on a very long street, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another.  He had already become reconciled to the fact that this would remain an intention—he was not very bold in the presence of women and, besides, the morning was not a propitious time to speak to a girl who was in a hurry—when it happened that one evening, about Christmas time, he saw the girl walking right in front of him.  “Miss,” he said.  She turned, recognized the man whom she always encountered in the morning, without stopping let her eye rest on him for a moment, and since Menz said nothing further, turned away again.  They were in a brightly lit street in the midst of a great crowd of people and Menz was able, without attracting attention, to step up quite close to her.  In this moment of decision Menz could think of nothing to say, but he was resolved to remain a stranger to the girl no longer, for he definitely intended to carry farther something begun so seriously, and so he made bold enough to tug at the bottom of the girl's jacket.  The girl suffered it as though nothing had happened.
 
 

6 November.  Whence the sudden confidence?  If it would only remain!  If I could go in and out of every door in this way, a passably erect person.  Only I don't know whether I want that.
 

We didn't want to tell our parents anything about it, but every evening after nine o'clock we met, I and two cousins, near the cemetery fence at a place where a little rise in the ground provided a good view.
 

The iron fence of the cemetery leaves a large, grass-grown place free on the left.
 
 

17 November.  Dream: On a rising way, beginning at the left when seen from below, there lay, about at the middle of the slope and mostly in the road, a pile of rubbish or solidly packed clay that had crumbled lower and lower on the right while on the left it stood up as tall as the palings of a fence.  I walked on the right where the way was almost clear and saw a man on a tricycle coming towards me from below and apparently riding straight at the obstacle.  He was a man who seemed to have no eyes, at least his eyes looked like holes that had been effaced.  The tricycle was rickety and went along in an uncertain and shaky fashion, but nevertheless without a sound, with almost exaggerated quietness and ease.  I seized the man at the last moment, held him as though he were the handle-bars of his vehicle, and guided the latter into the gap through which I had come.  Then he fell towards me, I was as large as a giant now and yet had an awkward hold on him, besides, the vehicle, as though out of control, began to move backwards, even if slowly, and pulled me after it.  We went past an open van on which a number of people were standing crowded together, all dressed in dark clothes, among them a Boy Scout wearing a light-gray hat with the brim turned up.  I expected this boy, whom I had already recognized at some distance, to help me, but he turned away and squeezed himself in among the people.  Then, behind this open van—the tricycle kept rolling on and I, bent low, with legs astraddle, had to follow—there came towards me someone who brought me help, but whom I cannot remember.  I only know that he was a trustworthy person who is now concealing himself as though behind a black cloth curtain and whose concealment I should respect.
 
 

18 November.  I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing?  At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled—without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion—to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.
 

Two dogs in a yard into which the sun shone hotly ran towards each other from opposite directions.
 

Worried and slaved over the beginning of a letter to Miss Bl.
 
 

19 November.  The reading of the diary moves me.  Is it because I no longer have the slightest confidence now?  Everything appears to me to be an artificial construction of the mind.  Every mark by someone else, every chance look throws everything in me over on the other side, even what has been forgotten, even what is entirely insignificant.  I am more uncertain than I ever was, I feel only the power of life.  And I am senselessly empty.  I am really like a lost sheep in the night and in the mountains, or like a sheep which is running after this sheep.  To be so lost and not have the strength to regret it.
 

I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores.  Walking past them excites me, the remote but nevertheless existent possibility of going with one.  Is that grossness?  But I know no better, and doing this seems basically innocent to me and causes me almost no regret.  I want only the stout, older ones, with outmoded clothes that have, however, a certain luxuriousness because of various adornments.  One woman probably knows me by now.  I met her this afternoon, she was not yet in her working clothes, her hair was still flat against her head, she was wearing no hat, a work blouse like a cook's, and was carrying a bundle of some sort, perhaps to the laundress.  No one would have found anything exciting in her, only me.  We looked at each other fleetingly.  Now, in the evening, it had meanwhile grown cold, I saw her, wearing a tight-fitting, yellowish-brown coat, on the other side of the narrow street that branches off from Zeltnerstrasse, where she has her beat.  I looked back at her twice, she caught the glance too, but then I really ran away from her.
 

This uncertainty is surely the result of thinking about F.
 
 

20 November.  Was at the cinema.  Lolotte.  The good minister.  The little bicycle.  The reconciliation of the parents.  Was tremendously entertained.  Before it, a sad film, The Accident on the Dock, after it, the gay Alone at Last.  Am entirely empty and insensible, the passing tram has more living feeling.
 
 

21 November.  Dream: The French cabinet, four men, is sitting around a table.  A conference is taking place.  I remember the man sitting on the long right side of the table, with his face flattened out in profile, yellowish-colored skin, his very straight nose jutting far forward (jutting so far forward because of the flatness of his face) and an oily, black, heavy moustache arching over his mouth.
 

Miserable observation which again is certainly the result of something artificially constructed whose lower end is swinging in emptiness somewhere: When I picked up the inkwell from the desk to carry it into the living room I felt a sort of firmness in me, just as, for instance, the corner of a tall building appears in the mist and at once disappears again.  I did not feel lost, something waited in me that was independent of people, even of F.  What would happen if I were to run away, as one sometimes runs through the fields?
 

These predictions, this imitating of models, this fear of something definite, is ridiculous.  These are constructions that even in the imagination, where they are alone sovereign, only approach the living surface but then are always suddenly driven under.  Who has the magic hand to thrust into the machinery without its being torn to pieces and scattered by a thousand knives?
 

I am on the hunt for constructions.  I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.
 
 

24 November.  Evening before last at Max's.  He is becoming more and more a stranger, he has often been one to me, now I am becoming one to him too.  Yesterday evening simply went to bed.
 

A dream towards morning: I am sitting in the garden of a sanatorium at a long table, at the very head, and in the dream I actually see my back.  It is a gloomy day, I must have gone on a trip and am in a motorcar that arrived a short time ago, driving up in a curve to the front of the platform.  They are just about to bring in the food when I see one of the waitresses, a young, delicate girl wearing a dress the color of autumn leaves, approaching with a very light or unsteady step through the pillared hall that served as the porch of the sanatorium, and going down into the garden.  I don't yet know what she wants but nevertheless point questioningly at myself to learn whether she wants me.  And in fact she brings me a letter.  I think, this can't be the letter I'm expecting, it is a very thin letter and a strange, thin, unsure handwriting.  But I open it and a great number of thin sheets covered in writing come out, all of them in the strange handwriting.  I begin to read, leaf through the pages, and recognize that it must be a very important letter and apparently from F.'s youngest sister.  I eagerly begin to read, then my neighbor on the right, I don't know whether man or woman, probably a child, looks down over my arm at the letter.  I scream, “No!”  The round table of nervous people begins to tremble.  I have probably caused a disaster.  I attempt to apologize with a few hasty words in order to be able to go on with the reading.  I bend over my letter again, only to wake up without resistance, as if awakened by my own scream.  With complete awareness I force myself to fall asleep again, the scene reappears, in fact I quickly read two or three more misty lines of the letter, nothing of which I remember, and lose the dream in further sleep.
 
 

The old merchant, a huge man, his knees giving way beneath him, mounted the stairs to his room, not holding the banister but rather pressing against it with his hand.  He was about to take his keys out of his trouser pocket, as he always did, in front of the door to the room, a latticed glass door, when he noticed in a dark corner a young man who now bowed.
 

“Who are you?  What do you want?” asked the merchant, still groaning from the exertion of the climb.
 

“Are you the merchant Messner?” the young man asked.
 

“Yes,” said the merchant.
 

“Then I have some information for you.  Who I am is really beside the point here, for I myself have no part at all in the matter, am only delivering the message.  Nevertheless I will introduce myself, my name is Kette and I am a student.”
 

“So,” said Messner, considering this for a moment.  “Well, and the message?” he then said.
 

“We can discuss that better in your room,” said the student.  “It is something that can't be disposed of on the stairs.”
 

“I didn't know that I was to receive any such message,” said Messner, and looked out of the corner of his eye at the door.
 

“That may be,” said the student.
 

“Besides,” said Messner, “it is past eleven o'clock now, no one will overhear us here.”
 

“No,” the student replied, “it is impossible for me to say it here.”
 

“And I,” said Messner, “do not receive guests at night,” and he stuck the key into the lock so violently that the other keys in the bunch continued to jingle for a while.
 

“Now look, I've been waiting here since eight o'clock, three hours,” said the student.
 

“That only proves that the message is important to you.  But I don't want to receive any messages.  Every message that I am spared is a gain, I am not curious, only go, go.”  He took the student by his thin overcoat and pushed him away a little.  Then he partly opened the door and tremendous heat flowed from the room into the cold hall.  “Besides, is it a business message?” he asked further, when he was already standing in the open doorway.
 

“That too I cannot say here,” said the student.
 

“Then I wish you good night,” said Messner, went into his room, locked the door with the key, turned on the light of the electric bed lamp, filled a small glass at a little wall cabinet in which were several bottles of liquor, emptied it with a smack of his lips, and began to undress.  Leaning back against the high pillows, he was on the point of beginning to read a newspaper when it seemed to him that someone was knocking softly on the door.  He laid the newspaper back on the bed cover, crossed his arms, and listened.  And in fact the knock was repeated, very softly and as though down very low on the door.  “A really impertinent puppy,” laughed Messner.  When the knocking stopped, he again picked up the newspaper.  But now the knocking came more strongly, there was a real banging on the door.  The knocking came the way children at play scatter their knocks over the whole door, now down low, dull against the wood, now up high, clear against the glass.  “I shall have to get up,” Messner thought, shaking his head.  “I can't telephone the housekeeper because the instrument is over there in the anteroom and I should have to wake the landlady to get to it.  There's nothing else I can do except to throw the boy down the stairs myself.”  He pulled a felt cap over his head, threw back the cover, pulled himself to the edge of the bed with his weight on his hands, slowly put his feet on the floor, and pulled on high, quilted slippers.  “Well now,” he thought, and, chewing his upper lip, stared at the door; “now it is quiet again.  But I must have peace once and for all,” he then said to himself, pulled a stick with a horn knob out of a stand, held it by the middle, and went to the door.
 

“Is anyone still out there?” he asked through the closed door.
 

“Yes,” came the answer.  “Please open the door for me.”
 

“I'll open it,” said Messner, opened the door and stepped out holding the stick.
 

“Don't hit me,” said the student threateningly, and took a step backward.
 

“Then go!” said Messner, and pointed his index finger in the direction of the stairs.
 

“But I can't,” said the student, and ran up to Messner so surprisingly—
 
 

27 November.  I must stop without actually being shaken off.  Nor do I feel any danger that I might get lost, still, I feel helpless and an outsider.  The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful.  The comprehensive view I had of everything on my walk yesterday!
 

The child of the housekeeper who opened the gate.  Bundled up in a woman's old shawl, pale, numb, fleshy little face.  At night is carried to the gate like that by the housekeeper.
 

The housekeeper's poodle that sits downstairs on a step and listens when I begin tramping down from the fourth floor, looks at me when I pass by.  Pleasant feeling of intimacy, since he is not frightened by me and includes me in the familiar house and its noise.
 

Picture: Baptism of the cabin boys when crossing the equator.  The sailors lounging around.  The ship, clambered over in every direction and at every level, everywhere provides them with places to sit.  The tall sailors hanging on the ship's ladders, one foot in front of the other, pressing their powerful, round shoulders against the side of the ship and looking down on the play.
 

[A small room.  ELSA and GERTRUD are sitting at the window with their needlework.  It is beginning to get dark.]

E:  Someone is ringing.  [Both listen.]

G:  Was there really a ring?  I didn't hear anything, I keep hearing less all the time.

E:  It was just very low.  [Goes into the anteroom to open the door.  A few words are exchanged.  Then the voice.]

E:  Please step in here.  Be careful not to stumble.  Please walk ahead, there's only my sister in the room.
 

Recently the cattle-dealer Morsin told us the following story.  He was still excited when he told it, despite the fact that the matter is several months old now:
 

“I very often have business in the city, on the average it certainly comes to ten days a month.  Since I must usually spend the night there too, and have always tried, whenever it is at all possible, to avoid stopping at a hotel, I rented a private room that simply—”
 
 

4 December.  Viewed from the outside it is terrible for a young but mature person to die, or worse, to kill himself.  Hopelessly to depart in a complete confusion that would make sense only within a further development, or with the sole hope that in the great account this appearance in life will be considered as not having taken place.  Such would be my plight now.  To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.
 

A group of men, masters and servants.  Rough-hewn faces shining with living colors.  The master sits down and the servant brings him food on a tray.  Between the two there is no greater difference, no difference of another category than, for instance, that between a man who as a result of countless circumstances is an Englishman and lives in London, and another who is a Laplander and at the very same instant is sailing on the sea, alone in his boat during a storm.  Certainly the servant can—and this only under certain conditions—become a master, but this question, no matter how it may be answered, does not change anything here, for this is a matter that concerns the present evaluation of a present situation.
 

The unity of mankind, now and then doubted, even if only emotionally, by everyone, even by the most approachable and adaptable person, on the other hand also reveals itself to everyone, or seems to reveal itself, in the complete harmony, discernible time and again, between the development of mankind as a whole and of the individual man.  Even in the most secret emotions of the individual.
 

The fear of folly.  To see folly in every emotion that strives straight ahead and makes one forget everything else.  What, then, is non-folly?  Non-folly is to stand like a beggar before the threshold, to one side of the entrance, to rot and collapse.  But P. and O. are really disgusting fools.  There must be follies greater than those who perpetrate them.  What is disgusting, perhaps, is this puffing-themselves-up of the little fools in their great folly.  But did not Christ appear in the same light to the Pharisees?
 

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 finally 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 gray, 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 door 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 gray 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”].
 

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.

                            Sir, buy it for your little lad
                            So he'd laugh and not be sad.
 

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 gray shawl entered.
 

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