by Franz Kafka
‘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 grey shawl entered.
2 January. A lot of time well spent with Dr Weiss.
4 January. We had scooped out a hollow in the sand, where we felt quite comfortable. At night we rolled up together inside the hollow, Father covered it over with trunks of trees, scattering underbrush on top, and we were as well protected as we could be from storms and wild beasts. ‘Father,’ we would often call out in fright when it had already grown dark under the tree trunks and Father had still not appeared. But then we would see his feet through a crack, he would slide in beside us, would give each of us a little pat, for it calmed us to feel his hand, and then we would all fall asleep as it were together. In addition to our parents we were five boys and three girls; the hollow was too small for us, but we should have felt afraid if we had not been so close to one another at night.
5 January. Afternoon. Goethe’s father was senile when he died. At the time of his father’s last illness Goethe was working on Iphigenie.
‘Take that woman home, she’s drunk,’ some court official said to Goethe about Christiane.
August, a drunkard like his mother, vulgarly ran around with common women. Ottilie, whom he did not love but was made to marry by his father for social reasons.
Wolf, the diplomat and writer.
Walter, the musician, couldn’t pass his examinations. Withdrew into the Gartenhaus for months; when the Tsarina wanted to see him: ‘Tell the Tsarina that I am not a wild animal.’ ‘My conscience is more lead than iron.’
Wolf’s petty, ineffectual literary efforts.
The old people in the garret rooms. Eighty-year-old Ottilie, fifty-year-old Wolf, and their old acquaintances.
Only in such extremes does one become aware of how every person is lost in himself beyond hope of rescue, and one’s sole consolation in this is to observe other people and the law governing them and everything. How, outwardly, Wolf can be guided, moved here or there, cheered up, encouraged, induced to work systematically – and how, inwardly, he is held fast and immovable.
Why don’t the Tchuktchis simply leave their awful country; considering their present life and wants they would be better off anywhere else. But they cannot; all things possible do happen, only what happens is possible.
A wine cellar had been set up in the small town of F. by a wine dealer from the larger city near by. He had rented a small vaulted cellar in a house on the Ringplatz, painted oriental decorations on the wall, and had put in old plush furniture almost past its usefulness.
6 January. Dilthey: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Love for humanity, the highest respect for all the forms it has taken; stands back quietly in the best post from which he can observe. On Luther’s early writings: ‘the mighty shades, attracted by murder and blood, that step from an invisible world into the visible one’ – Pascal.
Letter for A. to his mother-in-law. Liesl kissed the teacher.
8 January. Fantl recited Tête d’or:63 ‘He hurls the enemy about like a barrel.’
Uncertainty, aridity, peace – all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.
What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
Description of inexplicable emotions. A.: Since that happened, the sight of women has been painful to me, it is neither sexual excitement nor pure sorrow, it is simply pain. That’s the way it was too before I felt sure of Liesl.
12 January. Yesterday: Ottilie’s love affairs, the young Englishman – Tolstoy’s engagement; I have a clear impression of a young, sensitive, and violent person, restraining himself, full of forebodings. Well dressed, dark, and dark blue.
The girl in the coffee-house. Her tight skirt, her white, loose, furtrimmed silk blouse, bare throat, close-fitting grey hat. Her full, laughing, eternally pulsating face; friendly eyes, though a little affected. My face flushes whenever I think of F.
Clear night on the way home; distinctly aware of what in me is mere dull apathy, so far removed from a great clarity expanding without hindrance.
Nikolai Literaturbriefe.
There are possibilities for me, certainly; but under what stone do they lie?
Carried forward on the horse –
Youth’s meaninglessness. Fear of youth, fear of meaninglessness, of the meaningless rise of an inhuman life.
Tellheim: ‘He has – what only the creations of true poets possess -that spontaneous flexibility of the inner life which, as circumstances alter, continually surprises us by revealing entirely new facets of itself.’64
19 January. Anxiety alternating with self-assurance at the office. Otherwise more confident. Great antipathy to ‘Metamorphosis’. Unreada
ble ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.
23 January. B., the chief auditor, tells the story of a friend of his, a half-pay colonel who likes to sleep beside an open window: ‘During the night it is very pleasant; but in the morning, when I have to shovel the snow off the ottoman near the window and then start shaving, it is unpleasant.’
Memoirs of Countess Thürheim: ‘Her gentle nature made her especially fond of Racine. I have often heard her praying God that He might grant him eternal peace.’
There is no doubt that at the great dinners given in his honour at Vienna by the Russian ambassador Count Rasumovsky, he (Suvorov) ate like a glutton the food served upon the table without pausing for a soul. When he was full he would get up and leave the guests to themselves.
To judge by an engraving, a frail, determined, pedantic old man.
‘It wasn’t your fate,’ my mother’s lame consolation. The bad part of it is, that at the moment it is almost all the consolation that I need. There is my weak point and will remain my weak point; otherwise the regular, hardly varying, semi-active life I have led these last days (worked at the office on a description of our bureau’s activities; A.’s worries about his bride; Ottla’s Zionism; the girls’ enjoyment of the Salten-Schildkraut lecture; reading the memoirs of Thürheim; letters to Weiss and Löwy; proof-reading ‘Metamorphosis’) has really pulled me together and instilled some resolution and hope in me.
24 January. Napoleonic era: the festivities came hard upon each other, everyone was in a hurry ‘to taste to the full the joys of the brief interlude of peace’. ‘On the other hand, the women exercised an influence as if in passing, they had really no time to lose. In those days love expressed itself in an intensified enthusiasm and a greater abandonment.’ ‘In our time there is no longer any excuse for passing an empty hour.’
Incapable of writing a few lines to Miss Bl., two letters already remain unanswered, today the third came. I grasp nothing correctly and at the same time I feel quite hale, though hollow. Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offence write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: ‘as many times as you can stand it’.
A. cannot calm himself. In spite of the confidence he has in me and in spite of the fact that he wants my advice, I always learn the worst details only incidentally in the course of the conversation, whereupon I have always to suppress my sudden astonishment as much as I can – not without a feeling that my indifference in face of the dreadful news either must strike him as coldness, or on the contrary must greatly console him. And in fact so I mean it. I learn the story of the kiss in the following stages, some of them weeks apart: A teacher kissed her; she was in his room; he kissed her several times; she went to his room regularly because she was doing some needlework for A.’s mother and the teacher had a good lamp; she let herself be kissed without resistance; he had already made her a declaration of his love; she still goes for walks with him in spite of everything, wanted to give him a Christmas present; once she wrote, Something unpleasant has happened to me but nothing came of it.
A. questioned her in the following way: How did it happen? I want to know all the details. Did he only kiss you? How often? Where? Didn’t he lie on you? Did he touch you? Did he want to take off your clothes?
Answer: I was sitting on the sofa with my sewing, he on the other side of the table. Then he came over, sat down beside me, and kissed me; I moved away from him towards the arm of the sofa and was pressed down with my head against the arm. Except for the kiss, nothing happened.
During the questioning she once said: ‘What are you thinking of? I am a virgin.’
Now that I think of it, my letter to Dr Weiss was written in such a way that it could all be shown to F. Suppose he did that today and for that reason put off his answer?
26 January. Unable to read Thürheim, though she has been my delight these past few days. Letter to Miss Bl. now sent on its way. How it has hold of me and presses against my brow. Father and Mother playing cards at the same table.
The parents and their grown children, a son and a daughter, were seated at table Sunday noon. The mother had just stood up and was dipping the ladle into the round-bellied tureen to serve the soup, when suddenly the whole table lifted up, the tablecloth fluttered, the hands lying on the table slid off, the soup with its tumbling bacon balls spilled into the father’s lap.
The way I almost insulted my mother just now because she had lent Elli65 Die böse Unschuld, which I had myself intended to offer her only yesterday. ‘Leave me my books! I have nothing else.’ Speeches of this kind in a real rage.
The death of Thürheim’s father: ‘The doctors who came in soon thereafter found his pulse very weak and gave the invalid only a few more hours to live. My God, it was my father they were speaking of! A few hours only, and then dead.’
28 January. Lecture on the miracles of Lourdes. Free-thinking doctor; bares his strong and energetic teeth, takes great delight in rolling his words. ‘It is time that German thoroughness and probity stand up to Latin charlatanism.’ Newsboys of the Messager de Lourdes: ‘Superbe guérison de ce soir!’ ‘Guérison affirmée!’ – Discussion: ‘I am a simple postal official, nothing more.’ ‘Hôtel de l’Univers.’ – Infinite sadness as I left, thinking of F. Am gradually calmed by my reflections.
Sent letter and Weiss’s Galeere to Bl.
Quite some time ago A.’s sister was told by a fortune-teller that her eldest brother was engaged and that his fiancée was deceiving him. At that time he rejected all such stories in a rage. I: ‘Why only at that time? It is as false today as it was then. She hasn’t deceived you, has she?’ He: ‘It’s true that she hasn’t, isn’t it?’
2 February. A.: A girl friend’s lewd letter to his fiancée. ‘If we were to take everything as seriously as when we were under the domination of the confessional sermons.’ ‘Why were you so backward in Prague, better to have one’s fling on a small scale than a large.’ I interpret the letter according to my own opinion, in favour of his fiancée, with several good arguments occurring to me.
Yesterday A. was in Schluckenau. Sat in the room with her all day holding the bundle of letters (his only baggage) in his hand and didn’t stop questioning her. Learned nothing new; an hour before leaving he asked her: ‘Was the light out during the kissing?’ and learned the news, which makes him inconsolable, that the second time W. kissed her he switched off the light. W. sat sketching on one side of the table, L. sat on the other (in W.’s room, at 11 p.m.) and read Asmus Semper aloud. Then W. got up, went to the chest to get something (a compass, L. thinks, A. thinks a contraceptive), then suddenly switched off the light, overwhelmed her with kisses; she sank down on the sofa, he held her arms, her shoulders, and kept saying, ‘Kiss me!’
L. on another occasion: ‘W. is very clumsy.’ Another time: ‘I didn’t kiss him.’ Another time: ‘I felt as if I were lying in your arms.’
A. ‘I must find out the truth, mustn’t I?’ (he is thinking of having her examined by a doctor). ‘Only suppose I learn on the wedding night that she has been lying. Perhaps she’s so calm only because he used a contraceptive.’
Lourdes: Attack on faith in miracles, also attack on the church. With equal justification he could argue against the churches, processions, confessions, the unhygienic practices everywhere, since it can’t be proved that prayer does any good. Karlsbad is a greater swindle than Lourdes; Lourdes has the advantage that people go there out of deepest conviction. What about the crackpot notions people have concerning operations, serum therapy, vaccination, medicines?
On the other hand: The huge hospitals for the pilgrimaging invalids;
the filthy piscinas; the brancards waiting for the special trains; the medical commission; the great incandescent crosses on the mountains; the Pope receives three million a year. The priest with the monstrance passes by, a woman screams from her stretcher, ‘I am cured!’ Her tuberculosis of the bone continues unchanged.
The door opened a crack. A revolver appeared and an outstretched arm.
Thürheim, II, 35, 28, 37: nothing sweeter than love, nothing pleasanter than flirtation; 45, 48: Jews.
10 February. Eleven o’clock, after a walk. Fresher than usual. Why?
1. Max said I was calm.
2. Felix is going to be married (was angry with him).
3. I remain alone, unless F. will still have me after all.
4. Mrs X.’s invitation; I think how I shall introduce myself to her.
By chance I walked in the direction opposite to my usual one, that is, Kettensteg, Hradčany, Karlsbrücke. Ordinarily I nearly collapse on this road; today, coming from the opposite direction, I felt somewhat lifted up.
11 February. Hastily read through Dilthey’s Goethe; tumultuous impression, carries one along, why couldn’t one set oneself afire and be destroyed in the flames? Or obey, even if one hears no command? Or sit on a chair in the middle of one’s empty room and look at the floor? Or shout ‘Forward!’ in a mountain defile and hear answering shouts and see people emerge from all the bypaths in the cliffs.
13 February. Yesterday at Mrs X.’s. Calm and energetic, an energy that is perfect, triumphant, penetrating, that finds its way into everything with eyes, hands, and feet. Her frankness, a frank gaze. I keep remembering the ugly, huge, ceremonious Renaissance hats with ostrich feathers that she used to wear; she repelled me so long as I didn’t know her personally. How her muff, when she hurries towards the point of her story, is pressed against her body and yet twitches. Her children, A. and B.