by Franz Kafka
This brings me to the conflict in my thoughts. If things were only as they seem to be on the road in the snow, it would be dreadful; I should be lost, lost not in the sense of a dreadful future menacing me but in the sense of a present execution. But I live elsewhere; it is only that the attraction of the human world is so immense, in an instant it can make one forget everything. Yet the attraction of my world too is strong; those who love me love me because I am ‘forsaken’ – not, I feel sure, on the principle of a Weissian vacuum, but because they sense that in happy moments I enjoy on another plane the freedom of movement completely lacking to me here.
If M., for example, should suddenly come here, it would be dreadful. Externally, indeed, my situation would at once seem comparatively brighter. I should be esteemed as one human being among others, I should have words spoken to me that were more than merely polite. I should sit at the actors’ table (less erect, it is true, than now, when I am sitting here alone, though even now I am slumped down); outwardly, I should be almost a match in conviviality for Dr H. – yet I should be plunged into a world in which I could not live. It only remains to solve the riddle of why I had fourteen days of happiness in Marienbad, and why, consequently, I might perhaps also be able to be happy here with M. (though of course only after a painful break-down of barriers). But the difficulties would probably be much greater than in Marienbad, my opinions are more rigid, my experience larger. What used to be a dividing-thread is now a wall, or a mountain range, or rather a grave.
30 January. Waiting for pneumonia. Afraid, not so much of the illness, as for and of my mother, my father, the director, and all the others. Here it would seem clear that the two worlds do exist and that I am as ignorant in face of the illness, as detached, as fearful, as, say, in face of a headwaiter. And moreover the division seems to me to be much too definite, dangerous in its definiteness, sad, and too tyrannical. Do I live in the other world, then? Dare I say that?
Someone makes the remark: ‘What do I care about life? It is only on my family’s account that I don’t want to die.’ But it is just the family that is representative of life, and so it is on life’s account that he wants to stay alive. Well, so far as my mother is concerned, this would seem to be the case with me as well, though only lately. But is it not gratitude and compassion that have brought this change about in me? Yes, gratitude and compassion, because I see how, with what at her age is inexhaustible strength, she bends every effort to compensate me for my isolation from life. But gratitude too is life.
31 January. This would mean that it is on my mother’s account that I am alive. But it cannot be true, for even if I were much more important than I am, I should still be only an emissary of Life, and, if by nothing else, joined to it by this commission.
The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the tiniest step upwards, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security for myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the Negative, not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it. Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won’t tolerate my having the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage bed, for example, even before it has been set up.
1 February. Nothing, merely tired. The happiness of the truck driver, whose every evening is as mine has been today, and even finer. An evening, for example, stretched out on the stove. A man is purer than in the morning; the period before falling wearily asleep is really the time when no ghosts haunt one; they are all dispersed; only as the night advances do they return, in the morning they have all assembled again, even if one cannot recognize them; and now, in a healthy person the daily dispersal of them begins anew.
Looked at with a primitive eye, the real, incontestable truth, a truth marred by no external circumstance (martyrdom, sacrifice of oneself for the sake of another), is only physical pain. Strange that the god of pain was not the chief god of the earliest religions (but first became so in the later ones, perhaps). For each invalid his household god, for the tubercular the god of suffocation. How can one bear his approach if one does not partake of him in advance of the terrible union?
2 February. Struggle on the road to Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B. in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes, his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connexion it occurs to me – but this is already forced – that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.
The ‘struggle’ would probably be horrible if I were to learn a trade.
The Negative having been in all probability greatly strengthened by the ‘struggle’, a decision between insanity and security is imminent.
The happiness of being with people.
3 February. Almost impossible to sleep; plagued by dreams, as if they were being scratched on me, on a stubborn material.
There is a certain failing, a lack in me, that is clear and distinct enough but difficult to describe: it is a compound of timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness; by this I intend to characterize something specific, a group of failings that under a certain aspect constitute one single clearly defined failing (which has nothing to do with such grave vices as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This failing keeps me from going mad, but also from making any headway. Because it keeps me from going mad, I cultivate it; out of fear of madness I sacrifice whatever headway I might make and shall certainly be the loser in the bargain, for no bargains are possible at this level. Provided that drowsiness does not intervene and with its nocturnal-diurnal labour break down every obstacle and clear the road. But in that event I shall be snapped up by madness – for to make headway one must want to, and I did not.
4 February. In the terrible cold, my changed face, the incomprehensible faces of the others.
What M. said, without being able completely to understand the truth of it (there is a type of sad conceit that is wholly justified), about the joy of merely talking with people. How can talking delight anyone but me! Too late, probably, and returning by a queer roundabout way to people.
5 February. Escape them. Any kind of nimble leap. At home beside the lamp in the silent room. Incautious to say this. It calls them out of the woods as if one had lit the lamp to help them find the way.
6 February. The comfort in hearing that someone had served in Paris, Brussels, London, Liverpool, had gone up the Amazon on a Brazilian steamer as far as the Peruvian border, with comparative ease had borne the dreadful sufferings of the winter campaign of the Seven Communities126 because he had been accustomed to hardship since his childhood. The comfort consists not only in the demonstration that such things are possible, but in the pleasure one feels when one realizes that with these achievements on the one level, much at the same time must have necessarily been achieved on the other level, much must have been wrung from clenched fists. It is possible, then.
7 February. Shielded and exhausted by K. and H.
8 February. Horribly taken advantage of by both and yet – I surely could not live like that (it is not living, it is a tug-of-war in which the other person keeps straining and winning and yet never pulls me across); I sink into a peaceful numbness, as I did that time with W.
9 February. Two days lost; used the same two days, however, to get settled.
10 February. Can’t sleep; have not the slightest relationship with people other than what their initiative creates, which then persuades me for the moment, as does everything they do.
New attack by G. Attacked right and left as I am by overwhelming forces, it is as plain as can be that I cannot escape either to the right or to the left – straight on only, starved beast, lies the road to food that will sustain you, air that you can breathe, a free life, even if it should take you beyond life. Great, tall commander-in-chief, leader of multitudes, lead the despairing through the mountain passes no one else can find beneath the snow. And who is it that gives you your strength? He who gives you your c
lear vision.
The commander-in-chief stood at the window of the ruined hut and looked outside with wide, unclosing eyes at the column of troops marching by in the snow under the pale moonlight. Now and then it seemed to him that a soldier out of ranks would halt by the window, press his face against the pane, look at him for a moment, and then go on. Though always a different soldier, it always seemed to him to be the same one; a big-boned face with fat cheeks, round eyes, and coarse sallow skin; each time that the man walked away he would straighten the straps of his pack, shrug his shoulders, and skip his feet to get back into step with the mass of troops marching by as always in the background. The commander-in-chief had no intention of tolerating this game any longer; he lay in wait for the next soldier, threw open the window in his face, and seized the man by the front of his coat. ‘Inside with you!’ he said, and made him climb through the window. He pushed the man into a corner, stood in front of him, and asked: ‘Who are you?’
‘Nobody,’ the soldier said, fearfully.
‘One might have expected as much,’ the commander-in-chief said. ‘Why did you look inside?’
‘To see if you were still here.’
12 February. The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’, that is all that I have known, nothing more.
The fear I have tobogganing, my nervousness in walking on the slippery snow; a little story I read today revived in me the long unheeded, ever-present question of whether the cause of my downfall was not insane selfishness, mere anxiety for self; not, moreover, anxiety for a higher self, but vulgar anxiety for my well-being; such that it would seem that I have dispatched my own avenger from myself (a special instance of the-right-hand-not-knowing-what-the-left-hand-does). In the Great Account of my life, it is still reckoned as if my life were first beginning tomorrow, and in the meantime it is all over with me.
13 February. The possibility of serving with all one’s heart.
14 February. The power comfort has over me, my powerlessness without it. I know no one in whom both are so great. Consequently everything I build is insubstantial, unstable; the maid who forgets to bring me my warm water in the morning overturns my world. At the same time I have been under comfort’s constant harassment; it has deprived me not only of the strength to bear up under anything, but also the strength myself to create comfort; it creates itself about me of itself, or I achieve it by begging, crying, renouncing more important things.
15 February. A bit of singing on the floor below, an occasional door slamming in the corridor, and all is lost.
16 February. The story of the crevice in the glacier.
18 February. The theatre director who must himself create everything from the ground up, has even first to beget the actors. A visitor is not admitted; the director has important theatrical work in hand. What is it? He is changing the diapers of a future actor.
19 February. Hopes?
20 February. Unnoticeable life. Noticeable failure.
25 February. A letter.
26 February. I grant – to whom do I grant it? the letter? – that possibilities exist in me, possibilities close at hand that I don’t yet know of; only to find the way to them! and when I have found it, to dare! This signifies a great many things: that possibilities do exist; it even signifies that a scoundrel can become an honest man, a man happy in his honesty.
Your drowsy fantasies recently.
Kafka Sketch
27 February. Slept badly in the afternoon; everything is changed; my misery pressing me hard again.
28 February. View of the tower and the blue sky. Calming.
1 March. Richard III. Impotence.
5 March. Three days in bed. A small party of people at my bedside. A sudden reversal. Flight. Complete surrender. These world-shaking events always going on within four walls.
6 March. New seriousness and weariness.
7 March. Yesterday the worst night I have had; as if everything were at an end.
9 March. But that was only weariness; today a fresh attack, wringing the sweat from my brow. How would it be if one were to choke to death on oneself? If the pressure of introspection were to diminish, or close off entirely, the opening through which one flows forth into the world. I am not far from it at times. A river flowing upstream. For a long time now, that is what for the most part has been going on.
Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself. The only possibility. But what strength and skill that requires! And how late it is already!
Life in the jungle. Jealous of the happiness and inexhaustibility of nature, whose impelling force (like mine) is yet distress, though always satisfying all the demands its antagonist lays upon it. And so effortlessly, so harmoniously.
In the past, when I had a pain and it passed away, I was happy; now I am merely relieved, while there is this bitter feeling in me: ‘Only to be well again, nothing more.’
Somewhere help is waiting and the beaters are driving me there.
13 March. This pure feeling I have and my certainty of what has caused it: the sight of the children, one girl especially (erect carriage, short black hair), and another (blonde; indefinite features, indefinite smile); the rousing music, the marching feet. A feeling of one in distress who sees help coming but does not rejoice at his rescue – nor is he rescued – but rejoices, rather, at the arrival of fresh young people imbued with confidence and ready to take up the fight; ignorant, indeed, of what awaits them, but an ignorance that inspires not hopelessness but admiration and joy in the onlooker and brings tears to his eyes. Hatred too of him whom the fight is against is mingled in it (but little Jewish feeling, or so I think).
15 March. Objections to be made against the book: he has popularized it, and with a will, moreover – and with magic. How he escapes the dangers (Blüher).127
To flee to a conquered country and soon find it insupportable there, for there is nowhere else to flee.
16 March. The attacks, my fear, rats that tear at me and whom my eyes multiply.
17 March. 99•3°.
Still unborn and already compelled to walk around the streets and speak to people.
19 March. Hysteria making me surprisingly and unaccountably happy.
20 March. Yesterday an unsuccessful, today a lost (?) evening. A hard day.
The conversation at dinner on murderers and executions. The placidly breathing breast knows no fear. Knows no difference between murder planned and murder executed.
23 March. In the afternoon dreamed of the boil on my cheek. The perpetually shifting frontier that lies between ordinary life and the terror that would seem to be more real.
24 March. How it lies in wait for me! On the way to the doctor, for example, so often there.
29 March. In the stream.
4 April. How long the road is from my inner anguish to a scene like that in the yard – and how short the road back. And since one has now reached one’s home, there is no leaving it again.
6 April. Yesterday an outbreak I had been afraid of for two days; further pursuit; the enemy’s great strength. One of the causes: the talk with my mother, the jokes about the future – Planned letter to Milena.
The three Erinyes. Flight into the grove. Milena.
7 April. The two pictures and the two terra-cotta figures in the exhibition.
Fairy princess (Kubin), naked on a divan, looks out of an open window; the landscape prominently looming up, has a kind of airiness like that in Schwind’s picture.
Nude girl (Bruder)128 German-Bohemian, her unmatchable grace faithfully caught by a lover; noble, convincing, seductive.
Pietsch: Seated peasant girl; luxuriously resting with one leg under her, her ankle bent. St
anding girl, her right arm clasping her body across her belly; left hand supporting her head under the chin; broad-nosed, simple, and pensive, unique face.
Letter by Storm.
10 April. The five guiding principles on the road to hell (in genetic succession):
1. ‘The worst lies outside the window.’ All else is conceded to be angelic either openly or (more often) by silently ignoring it.
2. ‘You must possess every girl!’ not in Don Juan fashion, but according to the devil’s expression, ‘sexual etiquette’.