by Franz Kafka
28 December. When I have acted like a human being for a few hours, as I did today with Max and later at Baum’s, I am already full of conceit before I go to sleep.
3 January. ‘You,’ I said, and then gave him a little shove with my knee, ‘I want to say good-bye.’ At this sudden utterance some saliva flew from my mouth as an evil omen.
‘But you’ve been considering that for a long time,’ he said, stepped away from the wall and stretched.
‘No, I haven’t been considering it at all.’
‘Then what have you been thinking about?’
‘For the last time I have been preparing myself a little more for the company. Try as you may, you won’t understand that. I, an average man from the country, whom at any moment one could exchange for one of those who wait together by the hundreds in railway stations for particular trains.’
4 January. Glaube und Heimat by Schönherr.
The wet fingers of the balconyites beneath me who wipe their eyes.
6 January. ‘You,’ I said, aimed, and gave him a little shove with my knee, ‘but now I’m going. If you want to see it too, open your eyes.’
‘Really, then?’ he asked, at the same time looking at me from wide-open eyes with a direct glance that nevertheless was so weak that I could have fended it off with a wave of my arm. ‘You’re really going, then? What shall I do? I cannot keep you. And if I could, I still wouldn’t want to. By which I simply want to make clear to you your feeling that you could still be held back by me.’ And immediately he assumed that inferior servants’ face by means of which they are permitted within an otherwise regulated state to make the children of their masters obedient or afraid.
7 January. N.’s sister who is so in love with her fiancé that she manoeuvres to speak with each visitor individually, since one can better express and repeat one’s love to a single person.
As though by magic, since neither external nor internal circumstances – which are now more friendly than they have been for a year – prevented me, I was kept from writing the entire holiday, it is a Sunday. – Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.
12 January. I haven’t written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have greater weight while I sleep) but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen – and in any event I am not capable of it – then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late.
A few days ago Leonie Frippon, cabaret girl, Stadt Wien. Hair dressed in a bound-up mass of curls. Bad girdle, very old dress, but very pretty with tragic gestures, fiutterings of the eyelids, thrusts of the long legs, skilful stretching of the arms along the body, significance of the rigid throat during ambiguous passages. Sang: Button Collection in the Louvre.
Schiller, as drawn by Schadow in 1804 in Berlin, where he had been greatly honoured. One cannot grasp a face more firmly than by this nose. The partition of the nose is a little pulled down as a result of the habit of pulling on his nose while working. A friendly, somewhat hollow-cheeked person whom the shaven face has probably made senile.
14 January. Novel, Eheleute, by Beradt. A lot of bad Jewishness. A sudden, monotonous, coy appearance of the author; for instance: All were gay, but one was present who was not gay. Or: Here comes a Mr Stern (whom we already know to the marrow of his novelistic bones). In Hamsun too there is something like this, but there it is as natural as the knots in wood, here, however, it drips into the plot like a fashionable medicine on to sugar. Odd turns of expression are clung to interminably, for instance: He was busy about her hair, busy and again busy. Individual characters, without being shown in a new light, are brought out well, so well that even faults here and there do not matter. Minor characters mostly wretched.
17 January. Max read me the first act of Abschied von der Jugend. How can I, as I am today, come up to this? I should have to look for a year before I found a true emotion in me, and am supposed, in the face of so great a work, in some way to have a right to remain seated in my chair in the coffee-house late in the evening, plagued by the passing flatulence of a digestion which is bad in spite of everything.
19 January. Every day, since I seem to be completely finished – during the last year I did not wake up for more than five minutes at a time – I shall either have to wish myself off the earth or else, without my being able to see even the most moderate hope in it, I shall have to start afresh like a baby. Externally, this will be easier for me than before. For in those days I still strove with hardly a suspicion after a description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart, and which would transport me out of myself. With what misery (of course, not to be compared with the present) I began! What a chill pursued me all day long out of what I had written! How great the danger was and how uninterruptedly it worked, that I did not feel that chill at all, which indeed on the whole did not lessen my misfortune very much.
Once I projected a novel in which two brothers fought each other, one of whom went to America while the other remained in a European prison. I only now and then began to write a few lines, for it tired me at once. So once I wrote down something about my prison on a Sunday afternoon when we were visiting my grandparents and had eaten an especially soft kind of bread, spread with butter, that was customary there. It is of course possible that I did it mostly out of vanity, and by shifting the paper about on the tablecloth, tapping with my pencil, looking around under the lamp, wanted to tempt someone to take what I had written from me, look at it, and admire me. It was chiefly the corridor of the prison that was described in the few lines, above all its silence and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother who was left behind, because he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a momentary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but before that afternoon I never paid much attention to such feelings when among relatives to whom I was accustomed (my timidity was so great that the accustomed was enough to make me half-way happy), I sat at the round table in the familiar room and could not forget that I was young and called to great things out of this present tranquillity. An uncle who liked to make fun of people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, looked at it briefly, handed it back to me, even without laughing, and only said to the others who were following him with their eyes, ‘The usual stuff,’ to me he said nothing. To be sure, I remained seated and bent as before over the now useless page of mine, but with one thrust I had in fact been banished from society, the judgement of my uncle repeated itself in me with what amounted almost to real significance and even within the feeling of belonging to a family I got an insight into the cold space of our world which I had to warm with a fire that first I wanted to seek out.
19 February. When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but my other work. The office has an innocent share in it only to the extent that, if I did not have to go there, I could live calmly for my own work and should not have to waste these six hours a day which have tormented me to a degree that you cannot imagine, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my own things. In the final analysis, I know, that is just talk, the fault is mine and the office has a right to make the most definite and justified demands on me. But for me in particular it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity. I write this in the good light of the morning and would certainly not write it if it were not so t
rue and if I did not love you like a son.
For the rest, I shall certainly be myself again by tomorrow and come to the office where the first thing I hear will be that you want to have me out of your department.
The special nature of my inspiration in which I, the most fortunate and unfortunate of men, now go to sleep at 2 a.m. (perhaps, if I can only bear the thought of it, it will remain, for it is loftier than all before), is such that I can do everything, and not only what is directed to a definite piece of work. When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, ‘He looked out of the window’, it already has perfection.
‘Will you stay here for a long time?’ I asked. At my sudden utterance some saliva flew from my mouth as an evil omen.
‘Does it disturb you? If it disturbs you or perhaps keeps you from going up, I will go away at once, but otherwise I should still like to remain, because I’m tired.’
But finally he had every right to be satisfied too, and to become continually more satisfied the better I knew him. For he continually knew me even better, apparently, and could certainly stick me, with all my perceptions, in his pocket. For how otherwise could it be explained that I still remained on the street as though no house but rather a fire were before me. When one is invited into society, one simply steps into the house, climbs the stairs, and scarcely notices it, so engrossed is one in thought. Only so does one act correctly towards oneself and towards society.9
20 February. Mella Mars in the Cabaret Lucerna. A witty tragedienne who, so to speak, appears on a stage turned wrong side out in the way tragediennes sometimes show themselves behind the scenes. When she makes her appearance she has a tired, indeed even flat, empty, old face, which constitutes for all famous actors a natural beginning. She speaks very sharply, her movements are sharp too, beginning with the thumb bent backwards, which instead of bone seems to be made of stiff fibre. Unusual changeability of her nose through the shifting highlights and hollows of the playing muscles around it. Despite the eternal flashing of her movements and words she makes her points delicately.
Small cities also have small places to stroll about in.
The young, clean, well-dressed youths near me on the promenade reminded me of my youth and therefore made an unappetizing impression on me.
Kleist’s early letters, twenty-two years old. Gives up soldiering. They ask him at home: Well, how are you going to earn a living, for that was something they considered a matter of course. You have a choice of jurisprudence or political economy. But then do you have connexions at court? ‘I denied it at first in some embarrassment, but then declared so much the more proudly that I, even if I had connexions, should be ashamed, with my present ideas, to count on them. They smiled, I felt that I had been too hasty. One must be wary of expressing such truths.’
21 February. My life here is just as if I were quite certain of a second life, in the same way, for example, I got over the pain of my unsuccessful visit to Paris with the thought that I would try to go there again very soon. With this, the sight of the sharply divided light and shadows on the pavement of the street.10
For the length of a moment I felt myself clad in steel.
How far from me are – for example – my arm muscles.
Marc Henry – Delvard. The tragic feeling bred in the audience by the empty hall increases the effect of the serious songs, detracts from that of the merry ones. Henry does the prologue, while Delvard, behind a curtain that she doesn’t know is translucent, fixes her hair. At poorly attended performances, W., the producer, seems to wear his Assyrian beard – which is otherwise deep black – streaked with grey. Good to have oneself blown upon by such a temperament, it lasts for twenty-four hours, no, not so long. Much display of costumes, Breton costumes, the undermost petticoat is the longest, so that one can count the wealth from a distance – Because they want to save an accompanist, Delvard does the accompaniment first, in a very low-cut green dress, and freezes – Parisian street cries. Newsboys are omitted – Someone speaks to me; before I draw a breath I have been dismissed – Delvard is ridiculous, she has the smile of an old maid, an old maid of the German cabaret. With a red shawl that she fetches from behind the curtain, she plays revolution. Poems by Dauthendey in the same tough, unbreakable voice. She was charming only at the start, when she sat in a feminine way at the piano. At the song ‘À Batignolles’ I felt Paris in my throat. Batignolles is supposed to live on its annuities, even its Apaches. Bruant wrote a song for every section of the city.
THE URBAN WORLD
Oscar M., an older student – if one looked at him closely one was frightened by his eyes – stopped short in the middle of a snowstorm on an empty square one winter afternoon, in his winter clothes with his winter coat, over it a shawl around his neck and a fur cap on his head. His eyes blinked reflectively. He was so lost in thought that once he took off his cap and stroked his face with its curly fur. Finally he seemed to have come to a conclusion and turned with a dancing movement on to his homeward path.
When he opened the door to his parental living-room he saw his father, a smooth-shaven man with a heavy, fleshy face, seated at an empty table facing the door.
‘At last,’ said the latter, when Oscar had barely set foot in the room. ‘Please stay by the door, I am so furious with you that I don’t know what I might do.’
‘But father,’ said Oscar, and became aware only when he spoke how he had been running.
‘Silence,’ shouted the father and stood up, blocking a window. ‘Silence, I say. And keep your “buts” to yourself, do you understand?’ At the same time he took the table in both hands and carried it a step nearer to Oscar. ‘I simply won’t put up with your good-for-nothing existence any longer. I’m an old man. I hoped you would be the comfort of my old age, instead you are worse than all my illnesses. Shame on such a son, who through laziness, extravagance, wickedness, and – why shouldn’t I say so to your face – stupidity, drives his old father to his grave!’ Here the father fell silent, but moved his face as though he were still speaking.
‘Dear Father,’ said Oscar, and cautiously approached the table, ‘calm yourself, everything will be all right. Today I have had an idea that will make an industrious person out of me, beyond all your expectations.’
‘How is that?’ the father asked, and gazed towards a corner of the room.
‘Just trust me, I’ll explain everything to you at supper. Inwardly I was always a good son, but the fact that I could not show it outwardly embittered me so, that I preferred to vex you if I couldn’t make you happy. But now let me go for another short walk so that my thoughts may unfold more clearly.’
The father, who, becoming attentive at first, had sat down on the edge of the table, stood up. ‘I do not believe that what you just said makes much sense, I consider it only idle talk. But after all you are my son. Come back early, we will have supper at home and you can tell me all about this matter then.’
‘This small confidence is enough for me, I am grateful to you from my heart for it. But isn’t it evident in my very appearance that I am completely occupied with a serious matter?’
‘At the moment, no, I can’t see a thing,’ said the father. ‘But that could be my fault too, for I have got out of the habit of looking at you at all.’ With this, as was his custom, he called attention to the passage of time by regularly tapping on the surface of the table. ‘The chief thing, however, is that I no longer have any confidence at all in you, Oscar. If I sometimes yell at you – when you came in I really did yell at you, didn’t I? – then I do it not in the hope that it will improve you, I do it only for the sake of your poor, good mother who perhaps doesn’t yet feel any immediate sorrow on your account, but is already slowly going to pieces under the strain of keep off such sorrow, for she thinks she can help you in some way by this. But after all, these are really things which you know very well, and out of consideration for myself alone I should not have mentioned them again if you had not provoked me into it by your promises.’
&nbs
p; During these last words the maid entered to look after the fire in the stove. She had barely left the room when Oscar cried out, ‘But Father! I would never have expected that. If in the past I had had only one little idea, an idea for my dissertation, let’s say, which has been lying in my trunk now for ten years and needs ideas like salt, then it is possible, even if not probable, that, as happened today, I would have come running from my walk and said: “Father, by good fortune I have such-and-such an idea.” If with your venerable voice you had then thrown into my face the reproaches you did, my idea would simply have been blown away and I should have had to march off at once with some sort of apology or without one. Now just the contrary! Everything you say against me helps my ideas, they do not stop, becoming stronger, they fill my head. I’ll go, because only when I am alone can I bring them into order.’ He gulped his breath in the warm room.
‘It may be only a piece of rascality that you have in your head,’ said the father with his eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘In that case I am ready to believe that it has got hold of you. But if something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.’
Oscar turned his head as though someone had him by the throat. ‘Leave me alone now. You are worrying me more than is necessary. The bare possibility that you can correctly predict my end should really not induce you to disturb me in my reflections. Perhaps my past gives you the right to do so, but you should not make use of it.’
‘There you see best how great your uncertainty must be when it forces you to speak to me so.’
‘Nothing forces me,’ said Oscar, and his neck twitched. He also stepped up very close to the table so that one could no longer tell to whom it belonged. ‘What I said, I said with respect and even out of love for you, as you will see later, too, for consideration for you and Mama plays the greatest part in my decisions.’