by Franz Kafka
4. ‘All comes back to mere needs.’ Since you have needs, resign yourself to the fact.
5. ‘Needs are all.’ But how could you have all? Consequently you have not even needs.
As a boy I was as innocent of and uninterested in sexual matters (and would have long remained so, if they had not been forcibly thrust on me) as I am today in, say, the theory of relativity. Only trifling things (yet even these only after they were pointedly called to my attention) struck me, for example that it was just those women on the street who seemed to me most beautiful and best dressed who were supposed to be bad.
11 April. ‘All that he deserves is the dirty unknown old woman with shrunken thighs who drains his semen in an instant, pockets the money, and hurries off to the next room where another customer is already waiting for her.’
Eternal youth is impossible; even if there were no other obstacle introspection would make it impossible.
13 April. Max’s grief. Morning in his office.
Afternoon in front of the Thein Church (Easter Sunday).
My fear of being disturbed; my insomnia because of this fear. A nightmare recently because of M.’s letter in my portfolio.
1. Young little girl, eighteen years old; nose, shape of head, blonde; seen fleetingly in profile; came out of the church.
16 April. Max’s grief. A walk with him. Tuesday he leaves.
2. Five-year-old girl; orchard, little path to the main alley; hair, nose, shining face.
23 April. 3. Fawn-coloured velvet jacket in the distance in the direction of the fruit market.
Helpless days; yesterday evening.
27 April. Yesterday a Makkabi girl in the office of Selbstwehr telephoning: ‘Přišla jsem ti pomoct.’129 Clear, cordial voice and speech.
Shortly thereafter opened the door to M.
8 May. Work with the plough. It digs in deep and yet goes easily along. Or it just scratches the ground. Or it moves along with the plough-share drawn uselessly up; with it or without it, it is all the same.
The work draws to an end in the way an unhealed wound might draw together.
Would you call it a conversation if the other person is silent and, to keep up the appearance of a conversation, you try to substitute for him, and so imitate him, and so parody him, and so parody yourself.
M. was here, won’t come again; probably wise and right in this, yet there is perhaps still a possibility whose locked door we both are guarding lest it open, or rather lest we open it, for it will not open of itself.
Maggid.130
12 May. The constant variety of the form it takes, and once, in the midst of it all, the affecting sight of a momentary abatement in its variations.
From Pilger Kamanita, from the Vedas: ‘O beloved, even as a man brought blindfold from the land of the Gandharians and then set free in the desert will wander east or north or south, for in blindness was he brought there and in blindness was set free; yet after someone has struck the blindfold from his eyes and said to him: “Thither dwell the Gandharians, go ye thither,” after having asked his way from village to village, enlightened and made wise he comes home to the Gandharians – so too a man who has found a teacher here below knows: “I shall belong to this earthly coil until I am redeemed, and then I shall return home.” ’
In the same place: ‘Such a one, so long as he dwells in the body, is seen by men and gods; but after his body is fallen to dust, neither men nor gods see him more. And even nature, the all-seeing, sees him no more: he has blinded the eye of nature, he has vanished from the sight of the wicked.’
19 May. He feels more deserted with a second person than when alone. If he is together with someone, this second person reaches out for him and he is helplessly delivered into his hand. If he is alone, all mankind reaches out for him – but the innumerable outstretched arms become entangled with one another and no one reaches to him.
20 May. The Freemasons on Altstädter Ring. The possible truth that there is in every discourse and doctrine.
The dirty little barefoot girl running along in her shift with her hair blowing.
23 May. It is incorrect to say of anyone: Things were easy for him, he suffered little; more correct: His nature was such that nothing could happen to him; most correct: He has suffered everything, but all in a single all-embracing moment; how could anything have still happened to him when the varieties of sorrow had been completely exhausted either in actual fact or at his own peremptory command? (Two old Englishwomen in Taine.)
25 May. Day before yesterday ‘H. K.’ Pleasant walk today. Everywhere people sitting, wearily standing, dreamily leaning – Much disturbed.
26 May. The severe ‘attacks’ during the evening walk (resulting from four tiny vexations during the day: the dog in the summer resort; Mars’s book; enlistment as a soldier; lending the money through Z.); momentary confusion, helplessness, hopelessness, unfathomable abyss, nothing but abyss; only when I turned in at the front door did a thought come to my assistance – during the entire walk none came to me, apparently because, in my complete hopelessness, I had made no attempt at all to seek it out, though otherwise its possibility is always close at hand.
5 June. Myslbeck’s funeral. Talent for ‘botch work’.
16 June. Quite apart from the insuperable difficulties always presented by Blüher’s philosophical and visionary power, one is in the difficult position of easily incurring the suspicion, almost with one’s every remark, of wanting ironically to dismiss the ideas of this book. One is suspect even if, as in my case, there is nothing farther from one’s mind, in face of this book, than irony. This difficulty in reviewing his book has its counterpart in a difficulty that Blüher, from his side, cannot surmount. He calls himself an anti-Semite without hatred, sine ira et studio, and he really is that; yet he easily awakens the suspicion, almost with his every remark, that he is an enemy of the Jews, whether out of happy hatred or unhappy love. These difficulties confront each other like stubborn facts of nature, and attention must be called to them lest in reflecting on this book one stumble over these errors and at the very outset be rendered incapable of going on.
According to Blüher, one cannot refute Judaism inductively, by statistics, by appealing to experience; these methods of the older anti-Semitism cannot prevail against Judaism; all other peoples can be refuted in this way, but not the Jews, the chosen people; to each particular charge the anti-Semites make, the Jew will be able to give a particular answer in justification. Blüher makes a very superficial survey, to be sure, of the particular charges and the answers given them.
This perception, in so far as it concerns the Jews and not the other peoples, is profound and true. Blüher draws two conclusions from it, a full and a partial one –
23 June. Planá.131
27 July. The attacks. Yesterday a walk with the dog in the evening. Tvrz Sedlec. The row of cherry trees where the woods end; it gives one almost the same sense of seclusion as a room. The man and woman returning from the fields. The girl in the stable door of the dilapidated farmyard seems almost at odds with her big breasts; an innocently attentive animal gaze. The man with glasses who is pulling the heavy cartload of fodder; elderly, somewhat hunchbacked, but nevertheless very erect because of his exertions; high boots; the woman with the sickle, now at his side and now behind him.
26 September. No entries for two months. With some exceptions, a good period thanks to Ottla. For the past few days collapse again. On one of the first days made a kind of discovery in the woods.
14 November. Always 99.6°, 99.9° in the evening. Sit at the desk, get nothing done, am hardly ever in the street. Nevertheless, tartuffism to complain of my illness.
18 December. All this time in bed. Yesterday Either/Or.
12 June. The horrible spells lately, innumerable, almost without interruption. Walks, nights, days, incapable of anything but pain.
And yet. No ‘and yet’, no matter how anxiously and tensely you look at me; Krizanovskaya on the picture postcard in front of me.
More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits – this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture – becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons.
TRAVEL DIARIES
TRIP TO FRIEDLAND AND REICHENBERG132
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1911
I SHOULD write the whole night through, so many things occur to me, but all of it rough. What a power this has come to have over me, whereas in the past I was able, so far as I remember, to elude it by a turn, a slight turn which by itself had been enough to make me happy.
A Reichenberg Jew in the compartment called attention to himself by uttering brief exclamations over expresses that are expresses only in so far as the fare is concerned. Meanwhile a very thin passenger was rapidly wolfing down ham, bread, and two sausages, the skins of which he kept scraping with a knife until they were transparent; finally he threw all the scraps and paper under the seat behind the steampipe. While eating in all this unnecessary heat and haste (a practice with which I am sympathetic, but cannot successfully imitate), he read through two evening papers that he held up in my direction. Protruding ears. A nose that seemed broad only by comparison. Wiped hair and face with his greasy hands without getting himself dirty, another thing I should not succeed in.
Across from me a deaf gentleman with a piping voice and a pointed beard and moustache laughed derisively at the Reichenberg Jew, silently at first, without betraying himself; after exchanging understanding glances with him, I joined in, always with a certain repugnance but out of some kind of feeling of deference. Later it turned out that this man, who read the Montagsblatt, ate something, bought wine at one stop and drank in the way I do, in gulps, was nobody.
Then too a red-cheeked young fellow who spent a great deal of time reading the Interessantes Blatt, the pages of which he carelessly cut open with the edge of his hand only finally to fold it up again, as if it were a piece of silk, with that painstaking solicitude people who have nothing to do display and which always arouses my admiration; he folded it together, creased it on the inside, straightened it out on the outside, smoothed the surfaces, and, bulky as it was, stuffed it into his breast pocket. Thus he intended to read it again at home. I don’t know where he got off.
The hotel in Friedland. The great entrance hall. I remember a Christ on the Cross that perhaps wasn’t there at all – No water closet; the snowstorm came up from below. For a while I was the only guest. Most of the weddings in the neighbourhood take place in the hotel. Very indistinctly I recall glancing into a room the morning after a wedding. It was very cold throughout the entrance hall and corridor. My room was over the hotel entrance; I felt the cold at once, how much more so when I became aware of the reason. In front of my room was a sort of alcove off the entrance hall; there on a table, in vases, were two bouquets left over from a wedding. The window closed top and bottom not with latches but with hooks. I now recollect that once I heard music for a short while. However, there was no piano in the guest room; perhaps there was one in the room where the wedding took place. Every time I went to close the window I saw a grocery store on the other side of the market place. My room was heated by burning logs. Chambermaid with a large mouth; once her throat was bare and her collar open, in spite of the cold; at times she was withdrawn in her manner, at other times surprisingly friendly; I was always respectful and embarrassed, as I usually am in the presence of friendly people. While she was fixing the fire she noticed with pleasure the brighter light I had had put in so that I could work in the afternoon and evening. ‘Of course, it was impossible to work with the other light,’ she said. ‘And with this one too,’ I said, after a few jaunty exclamations of the sort that unfortunately always come into my mouth when I am embarrassed. And I could think of nothing else but to express an opinion that electric light is at once too harsh and too weak. Whereupon she went silently on with the fire. Only when I said, ‘Besides, I have only turned the old lamp up,’ did she laugh a little, and we were in accord.
On the other hand, I can do things like the following very well: I had always treated her like a lady and she acted accordingly. Once I came back at an unexpected hour and saw her scrubbing the floor in the cold entrance hall. It gave me not the slightest difficulty to spare her whatever embarrassment she may have felt by saying hello to her and making some request about the heating.
Beside me on the return trip from Raspenau to Friedland the rigid, corpse-like man whose beard came down over his open mouth and who, when I asked him about a station, cordially turned towards me and with great animation gave me the information.
The castle in Friedland.133 The different ways there are to view it: from the plain, from a bridge, from the park, through bare trees, from the woods through tall firs. The castle astonishes one by the way it is built one part above the other; long after one has entered the yard it still presents no unified appearance, for the dark ivy, the dark grey walls, the white snow, the ice covering the slate-coloured glacis enhance the heterogeneity of its aspect. The castle is really built not on a plateau but around the rather steep sides of a hilltop. I went up by a road, slipping all the time, while the castellan, whom I encountered farther up, came up without difficulty by two flights of stairs. A wide view from a jutting coign. A staircase against the wall came pointlessly to an end halfway up. The chains of the drawbridge dangled in neglect from their hooks.
Beautiful park. Because it is laid out terrace-fashion on the slope, with scattered clumps of trees, but part of it too extending down around the pond below, it was impossible to guess what it looked like in summer. On the icy water of the pond floated two swans, one of them put its head and neck into the water. Uneasy and curious, but also undecided, I followed two girls who kept looking uneasily and curiously back at me; I was led by them along the mountain, over a bridge, a meadow, under a railway embankment into a rotunda unexpectedly formed by the wooded slope and the embankment, then higher up into a wood with no apparent end to it. The girls walked slowly at first, by the time I began to wonder at the extent of the wood they were walking more quickly, and by then we were already on the plateau with a brisk wind blowing, a few steps from the town.
The Emperor’s Panorama, the only amusement in Friedland. Didn’t feel quite at ease because I hadn’t been prepared for so elegantly furnished an interior as I found inside, had entered with snow-covered boots, and, sitting in front of the glass showcases, touched the rug only with my boot toes. I had forgotten how such places are arranged and for a moment was afraid I should have to walk from one chair to another. An old man reading a volume of the Illustrierte Welt at a little table lighted by a lamp was in charge of everything. After a while he showed magic-lantern slides for me. Later two elderly ladies arrived, sat down at my right, then another one at my left. Brescia, Cremona, Verona. People in them like wax dolls, their feet glued to the pavement. Tombstones; a lady dragging the train of her dress over a low staircase opens a door part way, looking backward all the while. A family, in the foreground a boy is reading, one hand at his brow; a boy on the right is bending an unstrung bow. Statue of the hero, Tito Speri: his clothes flutter in enthusiastic neglect about his body. Blouse, broad-brimmed hat.
The pictures more alive than in the cinema because they offer the eye all the repose of reality. The cinema communicates the restlessness of its motion to the things pictured in it; the eye’s repose would seem to be more important. The smooth floors of the cathedrals at the tip of our tongues. Why can’t they combine the cinema and stereoscope in this way? Posters reading ‘Pilsen Wührer’, familiar to me from Brescia.134 The gap between simply hearing about a thing and seeing lantern slides of it is greater than the gap between the latter and actually seeing the thing itself. Alteisenmarkt in Cremona. At the end wanted to tell the old
gentleman how much I enjoyed it, did not dare. Got the next programme. Open from ten to ten.
I had noticed the Literarischen Ratgeber of the Dürer Society in the window of the bookshop. Decided to buy it, but changed my mind, then once again returned to my original decision; while this went on I kept halting in front of the shop window at every hour of the day. The bookshop seemed so forlorn to me, the books so forlorn. It was only here that I felt a connexion between Friedland and the world, and it was such a tenuous one. But since all forlornness begets in me a feeling of warmth in return, I at once felt what must be this bookshop’s joy, and once I even went in to see the inside. Because there is no need for scientific works in Friedland, there was almost more fiction on its shelves than on those of metropolitan bookshops. An old lady sat under a green-shaded electric light. Four or five copies of Kunstwart, just unpacked, reminded me that it was the first of the month. The woman, refusing my help, took the book, of whose existence she was hardly aware, out of the display, put it into my hand, was surprised that I had noticed it behind the frosted pane (I had in fact already noticed it before), and began to look up its price in the ledgers, for she didn’t know it and her husband was out. I’ll return later on in the evening, I said (it was 4 p.m.), but did not keep my promise.
Reichenberg.
One is completely in the dark as to what real object people have in hurrying through a small town in the evening. If they live outside the town, then they surely have to use the tram, because the distances are too great. But if they live in the town itself, there are really no great distances to go and thus no reason to hurry. And yet people hurry with lengthened strides across this square which would not be too large for a village and which is made to seem even smaller by the unexpected size of the town hall (its shadow can more than cover the square). At the same time, because the square is so small, one can’t quite believe that the town hall is as large as it is, and would like to attribute his first impression of its size to the smallness of the square.