The Diaries of Franz Kafka (62 page)

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 clear 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. Standing 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’.

3. ‘This girl you are not permitted to possess!’ and for this very reason cannot. A heavenly
fata Morgana
in hell.

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.’