The Great Wall of China

by Franz Kafka

  According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

  There remained the inexplicable mountain of rock. – Legend tries to explain the inexplicable. Since it emerges from a ground of truth, it must end in the inexplicable once again.

  HE

  APHORISMS FROM THE 1920 DIARY

  6 January. Everything he does seems to him extraordinarily new. If it lacked the freshness of life, then it would inevitably – this he knows – have as much intrinsic worth as something from the ancient pit of hell. But this freshness deceives him; it allows him to forget this fact or shrug it off, or else to recognize it painlessly. For after all, today is undeniably this very day now present, on which progress is setting out to progress further.

  9 January. A superstition and a principle and an empowerment to live: Through the heaven of vices the hell of virtue is reached. Superstition is easy.

  10 January. A piece like a segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun looks in and the whole world with it. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that he should be the very one excluded from the spectacle.

  It is no disproof of one’s presentiment of a final release if the next day one’s imprisonment remains unchanged, or is actually intensified, or even if it is expressly stated that it will never end. On the contrary, all this may be a necessary precondition of the final release.

  On no occasion is he sufficiently prepared, but he cannot really blame himself for that, for when can one in this life, which so mercilessly requires one to be prepared every minute, find the time to prepare? And even if there were time, how could one prepare oneself before one knew the task; in other words, how can one ever be equal to any natural task whatever, any task that has not been artificially concocted? And for that reason he has long since gone under; strangely enough, but also comfortingly enough, that was what he was least of all prepared for.

  He has discovered the Archimedean principle, but he has turned it to account against himself; evidently it was only on this condition that he was permitted to discover it.

  13 January. Everything he does seems to him extraordinarily new, but at the same time, because of this unbelievable spate of novelty it seems extraordinarily amateurish, scarcely even tolerable, incapable of finding its place in history, breaking the chain of the generations, cutting off at its most profound source the music of the world for the first time, which before then could at least be divined. Sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself.

  He could have resigned himself to a prison. To end as a prisoner – that would have been a goal in life. But it was a barred cage that he was in. In and out through the bars flowed the din of the world, indifferently, imperiously, as if it were at home; the prisoner was actually free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could even have left the cage, after all the bars stood yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.

  He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this obstruction, again, he derives the proof that he is alive.

  14 January. Himself he knows, the others he believes; everything is sawn apart for him by this discrepancy.

  He is neither bold nor feckless. But he is not fearful either. A free life would not alarm him. Now such a life has not been vouchsafed to him, but even this does not worry him, indeed he does not worry about himself at all. But there is a certain someone, utterly unknown to him, who worries about him a great deal all the time, and about him alone. The worries of this someone about him, and especially the constant nature of these worries, give him many a racking headache in his quieter hours.

  He lives in the Dispersion. His elements, a freely roaming horde, wander about the world. And only because his room also belongs to the world does he sometimes catch sight of them in the distance. How is he supposed to be responsible for them? Can that still be called responsibility?

  Everything, even the most commonplace thing such as being served in a restaurant, he has to obtain by force with the help of the police. This robs life of all comfort.

  17 January. His own frontal bone blocks his way (he bloodies his brow by beating against his own brow).

  He feels imprisoned on this earth, he feels confined; the melancholy, the impotence, the sicknesses, the wild delusions of the captive break out in him; no consolation can console him, for the very reason that it is mere consolation, gentle, head-splitting consolation in the face of the brutal fact of imprisonment. But if he is asked what he actually wants he cannot reply, for – this is one of his strongest arguments – he has no conception of freedom.

  Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

  He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his origins, the second bars his road ahead. He struggles with both. Actually the first supports him in his struggle with the second, for this one wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his struggle with the first, for of course that one is driving him back. But that is only the case in theory; for it is not only the two antagonists that are present, but himself as well, and what his own intentions are who can really say?

  He has many judges, they are like an army of birds perching in a tree. Their voices intermingle, the questions of their rank and competence are hopelessly confused, and there is also a continuous changing of places. But one can nevertheless single out individuals among them, for instance there is one who holds the view that one has only to cross over to the side of the Good and one is already saved, without reference to the past and even without reference to the future.

  The self-torturing, sluggish, wave-like motion of all life, of other life and of his own, which often pauses for a long while but is at bottom unceasing, is a torture to him because it brings with it the unceasing compulsion to think. Sometimes it seems to him that this torture runs ahead of events. When he hears that a child is to be born to a friend of his, he recognizes that he has already suffered for that in his thoughts.

  He can see two things: the first consists of all those calm meditations, reflections, investigations, outpourings of self, which are filled with life and impossible without a certain sense of contentment. Their number and possibilities are infinite; even a woodlouse needs a relatively large crack to lodge itself in, but for such labours no space whatsoever is needed; even where not the smallest crack is to be found they can still live in their thousands and tens of thousands, permeating one another. That is the first thing. But the second is the moment in which one is called forth to render one’s account, can produce not a syllable, is flung back again upon one’s meditations, etc., but now, recognizing the hopelessness of it all, finds it impossible to dabble about in them any longer, goes limp, and sinks with a curse on one’s lips.

  2 February. He remembers a picture that represented a summer Sunday on the Thames. The whole breadth of the river was filled with boats, waiting for a lock-gate to be opened. In all the boats were gay young people in light, bright-coloured clothing; they were almost reclining there, freely abandoned to the warm air and the coolness of the water. They had so much in common that their convivial spirit was not confined to the separate boats; joking and laughter was passed on from boat to boat.

  He now imagined that in a meadow on the bank – the banks were only faintly suggested in the picture, the gathering of boats over-shadowed everything – he himself was standing. He was contemplating the festival, which was not really a festival at all, but still one could call it that. He naturally had a great desire to join in, indeed he longed to do so, but he was forced to admit to himself that he was excluded from it, it was impossible for him to fit in there; to do so would have required such great preparation that in the course of it not only this Sunday, but many years, and he himself, would have passed away; and even if time her
e could have come to a standstill, it would still have been impossible to achieve any other result; his whole origin, upbringing, physical development would have had to be different.

  So far removed, then, was he from these holiday-makers, and yet for all that he was very close to them too, and that was the more difficult thing to understand. They were, after all, human beings like himself, nothing human could be utterly alien to them, and so if one were to probe into them, one would surely find that the feeling which dominated him and excluded him from the river party was alive in them too, but of course with the difference that it was very far from dominating them and merely haunted some darker corners of their being.

  The fact that there is fear, grief and desolation in the world is something he understands, but even this only in so far as these are vague, general feelings, just grazing the surface. All other feelings he denies; what we call by that name is for him merely illusion, fairy tale, mirror images of our experience and our memory. We experience them only before and after the real event, which flits by at an elemental, incomprehensible speed; they are dream-like fictions, restricted to ourselves alone. We live in the stillness of midnight, and experience sunrise and sunset by turning towards the east or the west.

  15 February. It is a question of the following: One day many years ago I was sitting, sorrowfully enough to be sure, on the slopes of the Laurenziberg. I was examining the wishes that I had for my life. What emerged as the most important or the most attractive was the wish to gain a view of life (and – this was certainly a necessary part of it – to be able to convince others of it in writing), in which life, while still retaining its natural, full-bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, as a dream, as a hovering. A beautiful wish, perhaps, if I had wished it rightly. If it had been, say, like the wish to hammer a table together with painfully accurate craftsmanship, and simultaneously to do nothing, and moreover not so that people could say: ‘Hammering is nothing to him’, but rather ‘Hammering is to him a real hammering, and at the same time it is nothing’, whereby indeed the hammering would have become still bolder, still more determined, still more real and, if you will, still more insane. But he could not wish in this fashion, for his wish was no wish, it was merely a defence, a domestication of nothingness, a touch of animation that he wanted to give to nothingness, to that empty space in which he had by then scarcely taken his first conscious steps, but which he already felt as his element. It was at that time a sort of farewell that he took from the illusory world of youth; although youth had never directly deceived him, but only caused him to be deceived by the speeches of all the authorities around him. Thus had the necessity of his ‘wish’ arisen.

  He proves nothing but himself, his sole proof is himself, all his opponents overcome him at once, but not by refuting him (he is irrefutable), but by proving themselves.

  Human associations rest on this, that someone seems by the strength of his being to have refuted other individuals, in themselves irrefutable; which is sweet and comforting for those individuals, but it lacks truth, and invariably therefore permanence.

  He was once part of a monumental group. Round some kind of raised centre were ranged, in carefully thought-out order, symbolic figures representing the military, the arts, the sciences, the handicrafts. Of these many figures he was one. Now the group has long since dispersed, or at least he has left it and makes his own way through life. He no longer even has his old vocation, indeed he has actually forgotten what he once represented. Probably it is this very forgetting that gives rise to a certain melancholy, uncertainty, unrest, a certain longing for vanished ages, darkening the present. And yet this longing is an important element of man’s vital strength, or perhaps that strength itself.

  He does not live for the sake of his personal life, he does not think for the sake of his personal thoughts. It seems to him that he lives and thinks under the compulsion of a family, which certainly has more than enough vitality and intellectual power of its own, but for which he constitutes, in obedience to some law unknown to him, a formal necessity. Because of this unknown family and these unknown laws he cannot be released.

  Original sin, the ancient wrong committed by man, consists in the complaint which man makes and never ceases making, that a wrong has been done to him, that it was upon him that original sin was committed.

  Two children were hanging around in front of the window display at Casinelli’s, a boy of about six, a girl of seven, expensively dressed; they were talking of God and sin. I stopped behind them. The girl, perhaps a Catholic, thought that deceiving God was the only real sin. With childish obstinacy the boy, perhaps a Protestant, asked what deceiving human beings or stealing was. ‘They’re a very great sin too,’ said the girl, ‘but not the greatest, only the sins against God are the greatest, for sins against men we have confession. When I confess, right away there’s an angel standing behind me; but when I commit a sin the devil steps behind me, only you don’t see him.’ And tired of being half serious she spun round jokingly on her heels and said: ‘Look, there’s nobody behind me.’ The boy spun round too and there he saw me. ‘Look,’ he said, without caring that I was bound to hear him, or perhaps without thinking about it, ‘the devil is standing behind me.’ ‘I can see him too,’ said the girl, ‘but that’s not the one I’m talking about.’

  He does not want consolation, but not because he does not want it – who does not want it? – but because to seek consolation means: to devote one’s whole life to this task, to live perpetually on the borders of one’s existence and almost outside them, barely to remember for whom one is seeking consolation, and therefore not even being able to find effective consolation (effective, not by any means real consolation, which does not exist).

  He resists being determined by the gaze of his fellow men. Had Robinson Crusoe never left the highest, or more correctly the most visible point of his island, out of desire for consolation, or out of humility, or fear, or ignorance, or longing, he would soon have perished; but since without regard for the ships and their feeble telescopes he started to explore his whole island and to take pleasure in it, he kept himself alive, and finally, as a result that was at least logically necessary, he was found.

  19 February. ‘You make a virtue of your necessity.’

  ‘In the first place every one does that, and in the second, that’s just what I don’t do. I let my necessity remain necessity, I do not drain the swamp, but live in its feverish exhalations.’

  ‘That’s just what you make a virtue of.’

  ‘Like every one, as I said before. In any case I only do it for your sake. So that you may remain friendly to me I take injury to my soul.’

  My prison-cell – my fortress.

  Everything is allowed him, with the exception of self-oblivion, where-with in turn, however, everything is forbidden him, except the one thing that is immediately necessary for the whole.

  The limitation of awareness is a social requirement. All virtues are individual, all vices social; the things that pass for social virtues, such as love, disinterestedness, justice, self-sacrifice, are only ‘astonishingly’ enfeebled social vices.

  The difference between the ‘Yes and No’ that he says to his contemporaries, and the ‘Yes and No’ that he really ought to have said, might be likened to the difference between life and death; he can only grasp it in an equally vague sense.

  The reason why posterity’s judgement of individuals is juster than the contemporary one lies with the dead. One develops in one’s own way only after death, only when one is alone. The state of death is to the individual like Saturday evening to the chimney-sweep; it washes the grime from his body. It becomes apparent whether his contemporaries did more harm to him, or whether he did more harm to his contemporaries; in the latter case he was a great man.

  The strength to deny, that most natural expression of the human fighting organism, ever changing, renewing itself, reviving as it decays, this strength we possess always, bu
t not the courage; and yet life itself is denial, and therefore denial affirmation.

  He does not die along with his dying thoughts. Dying is merely a phenomenon within the inner world (which remains intact, even if it too should be only a thought), a natural phenomenon like any other, neither happy nor sad.

  ‘From rising up he is prevented by a certain heaviness, a sense of being secure against any event, by the presentiment of a resting-place that is prepared for him and belongs to him alone; while from lying still he is prevented by an uneasiness that drives him from his resting-place, he is prevented by his conscience, by the ceaseless beating of his heart, the fear of death and the desire to refute it – all this will not let him lie, and he rises up again. This up-and-down, and some random, fleeting, incidental observations made on the way, make up his life.’

  ‘Your account is dismal, but only as regards the analysis, the fundamental error of which it reveals. It is indeed so that man rises, falls back, rises again, and so forth, but at the same time it is also – and with yet far greater truth – utterly otherwise, for man is One, and hence in flight there is also repose, in repose there is flight, and both unite again in each individual being, and the union in each, and the union of the union in each, and so forth, until, well, until what is attained is real life, although this account also is just as false as yours and perhaps even more deceptive. The fact is, out of this realm there is no road leading to life, whereas there must surely have been a road from life leading into it. You see how lost we are.’

  The current against which he swims races so strongly that sometimes, in a certain fit of distraction, he despairs at the desolate calm in the midst of which he is splashing, so infinitely far has he been swept backwards in a moment of inadequacy.

  29 February. He is thirsty, and a mere clump of bushes separates him from the spring. But he is split in two: one part of him overlooks the whole scene, sees that he is standing here and that the spring is just beside him; but the second part notices nothing, has at most an inkling that the first part sees all. Since he notices nothing, however, he cannot drink.