The Diaries of Franz Kafka (58 page)

Later I saw my father sitting on the floor, his back against the sofa, as he sits when he plays with Felix.
¹¹⁴
Alarmed, I asked him what he was doing. He was pondering his scheme.

22 September. Nothing.

25 September. On the way to the woods. You have destroyed everything without having really possessed it. How do you intend to put it together again? What strength still remains to the roving spirit for the greatest of all labours?

Das neue Geschlecht
by Tagger – miserable, loud-mouthed, lively, skilful, well written in spots, with faint tremors of amateurishness. What right has he to make a big stir? At bottom he is as miserable as I and everybody else.

Not entirely a crime for a tubercular to have children. Flaubert’s father was tubercular. Choice: either the child’s lungs will warble (very pretty expression for the music the doctor puts his ear to one’s chest to hear), or it will be a Flaubert. The trembling of the father while off in the emptiness the matter is being discussed.

I can still have passing satisfaction from works like
A Country
Doctor
, provided I can still write such things at all (very improbable). But happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable.

The whips with which we lash each other have put forth many knots these five years.

28 September. Outline of my conversations with F.

I would put myself in death’s hands, though. Remnant of a faith. Return to a father. Great Day of Atonement.
¹¹⁵

From a letter to F., perhaps the last (1 October):

If I closely examine what is my ultimate aim, it turns out that I am not really striving to be good and to fulfil the demands of a Supreme Judgement, but rather very much the contrary: I strive to know the whole human and animal community, to recognize their basic predilections, desires, moral ideals, to reduce these to simple rules and as quickly as possible trim my behaviour to these rules in order that I may find favour in the whole world’s eyes; and, indeed (this is the inconsistency), so much favour that in the end I could openly perpetrate the iniquities within me without alienating the universal love in which I am held – the only sinner who won’t be roasted. To sum up, then, my sole concern is the human tribunal, which I wish to deceive, moreover, though without practising any actual deception.

8 October. In the meantime: letter of complaint from F.; G.B. threatens me with writing a letter. Disconsolate state (lumbago). Feeding the goats; field tunnelled by mice; digging potatoes (‘How the wind blows up our arses’); picking hips; the peasant F. (seven girls, one of them short, a sweet look, a white rabbit on her shoulder); a picture in the room,
Emperor Franz Josef in the Capuchin Tomb
; the peasant K. (a powerful man; loftily recited the whole history of his farm, yet
friendly and kind). General impression given one by peasants: noblemen who have escaped into agriculture, where they have arranged their work so wisely and humbly that it fits perfectly into everything and they are protected against all insecurity and worry until their blissful death. True dwellers on this earth – The boys who ran over the broad fields in the evening in pursuit of the fleeing, scattered herds of cattle, and who at the same time had to keep yanking round a young fettered bull that refused to follow.

Dickens’s
Copperfield
. ‘The Stoker’ a sheer imitation of Dickens, the projected novel even more so. The story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labour, his sweetheart in the country house, the dirty houses,
et al
., but above all the method. It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I should have taken from the times and the duller ones I should have got from myself. Dickens’s opulence and great, careless prodigality, but in consequence passages of awful insipidity in which he wearily works over effects he has already achieved. Gives one a barbaric impression because the whole does not make sense, a barbarism that I, it is true, thanks to my weakness and wiser for my epigonism, have been able to avoid. There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style. These rude characterizations which are artificially stamped on everyone and without which Dickens would not be able to get on with his story even for a moment. (Walser resembles him in his use of vague, abstract metaphors.)

9 October. At the peasant Lüftner’s. The great hall. All of it quite theatrical. His nervous hee-hee and ha-ha, banged on the table, raised his arms, shrugged his shoulders and lifted his beer glass like one of Wallenstein’s men. His wife beside him, an old woman whom he married ten years ago when he was her hired hand. Is a passionate hunter, neglects the farm. Two huge horses in the stable, Homeric figures in a fleeting ray of sunshine coming through the stable windows.

15 October. On the highway to Oberklee in the evening; went because the housekeeper and two Hungarian soldiers were sitting in the kitchen.

The view from Ottla’s window in the twilight, yonder a house and immediately behind it the open fields.

K. and his wife in their fields on the slope opposite my window.

21 October. Beautiful day, sunny, warm, no wind.

Most dogs bark pointlessly, even if someone is just walking by in the distance; but some, perhaps not the best watchdogs, yet rational creatures, quietly walk up to a stranger, sniff at him, and bark only if they smell something suspicious.

6 November. Sheer impotence.

10 November. I haven’t yet written down the decisive thing, I am still going in two directions. The work awaiting me is enormous.

Dreamed of the battle of the Tagliamento. A plain, the river wasn’t really there, a crowd of excited onlookers ready to run forwards or backwards as the situation changed. In front of us a plateau whose plainly visible edge was alternately bare and overgrown with tall bushes. Upon the plateau and beyond Austrians were fighting. Everyone was tense; what would be the outcome? By way of diversion you could from time to time look at isolated clumps on the dark slope, from behind which one or two Italians were firing. But that had no importance, though we did take a few steps backwards in flight. Then the plateau again: Austrians ran along the bare edge, pulled up abruptly behind the bushes, ran again. Things were apparently going badly, and moreover it was incomprehensible how they could ever go well; how could one merely human being ever conquer other human beings who were imbued with a will to defend themselves? Great despair, there will have to be a general retreat. A Prussian major appeared who had been watching the battle with us all the while; but when he calmly stepped forward into the suddenly deserted terrain, he seemed a new apparition. He put two fingers of each hand into his mouth and whistled the way one whistles to a dog, though affectionately. This was a signal to his detachment, which had been waiting close by and now marched forward. They were Prussian Guards, silent young men, not many,
perhaps only a company, all seemed to be officers, at least they carried long sabres and their uniforms were dark. When they marched by us, with short steps, slowly, in close order, now and then looking at us, the matter-of-factness of their death march was at once stirring, solemn, and a promise of victory. With a feeling of relief at the intercession of these men, I woke up.

[
Final entry of 1917. There are no entries for 1918
.]

27 June. A new diary, really only because I have been reading the old ones. A number of reasons and intentions, now, at a quarter to twelve, impossible to ascertain.

30 June. Was in Rieger Park. Walked up and down with J.
¹¹⁶
beside the jasmine bushes. False and sincere, false in my sighs, sincere in my feelings of closeness to her, in my trustfulness, in my feeling of security. Uneasy heart.

6 July. The same thought continually, desire, anxiety. Yet calmer than usual, as if some great development were going forward the distant tremor of which I feel. Too much said.

5 December. Again pulled through this terrible, long, narrow crack; it can only be forced through in a dream. On purpose and awake, one could certainly never do it.

8 December. Spent Monday, a holiday, in the park, the restaurant, and the Gallerie. Sorrow and joy, guilt and innocence, like two hands indissolubly clasped together; one would have to cut through flesh, blood, and bones to part them.

9 December. A lot of Eleseus.
¹¹⁷
But wherever I turn, the black wave rushes down on me.

11 December. Thursday. Cold. With J. in Rieger Park, said not a word. Seduction on the Graben. All this is too difficult. I am not sufficiently
prepared. It is the same thing, in a certain sense, as twenty-six years ago my teacher Beck saying, of course without realizing the prophetic joke he was making: ‘Let him continue in the fifth grade for a while, he still isn’t strong enough; rushing him in this way will have its consequences later on.’ And in fact such has been my growth, like a shoot forced too soon and forgotten; there is a certain hothouse delicacy in the way in which I shrink from a puff of wind, if you like, even something affecting in it, but that is all. Like Eleseus and his spring trips to the cities. By the way, he is not to be underestimated: Eleseus could have become the hero of the book, and in Hamsun’s youth such would probably have happened.

6 January. His every action seems extraordinarily new to him. If it had not this fresh and living quality, of itself it would inevitably be something out of the old swamp of hell, this he knows. But this freshness deceives him: it allows him to forget his knowledge, or be heedless of it, or, though he see through the freshness, see without pain.

Today is undoubtedly the day, is it not, on which progress prepares to progress farther?

9 January. Superstition and principle and what makes life possible: Through a heaven of vice a hell of virtue is reached. So easily? So dirtily? So unbelievably? Superstition is easy.

A segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun, and the whole world with it, peep in. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that just he should be the one to be debarred from the spectacle.

It is no disproof of one’s presentiment of an ultimate liberation if the next day one’s imprisonment continues on unchanged, or is even made straiter, or if it is even expressly stated that it will never end. All this can rather be the necessary preliminary to an ultimate liberation.
¹¹⁸

15 October [1921]. About a week ago gave M.
¹¹⁹
all the diaries. A little freer? No. Am I still able to keep a diary? It will in any case be a different kind of diary, or rather it will hide itself away, there won’t be any diary at all; only with the greatest of effort could I note something down on Hardt, for example, though I was rather taken with him. It is as if I had already written everything there was to write about him long ago, or, what is the same thing, as if I were no longer alive. I could probably write about M., but would not willingly do it, and moreover it would be aimed too directly at myself; I no longer need to make myself so minutely conscious of such things, I am not so forgetful as I used to be in this respect, I am a memory come alive, hence my insomnia.