Diaries of Franz Kafka Read online

  And now compare me to your daughter, this healthy, gay, natural, strong girl. As often as I have repeated it to her in perhaps five hundred letters, and as often as she has calmed me with a ‘no’ that to be sure has no very convincing basis – it nevertheless remains true that she must be unhappy with me, so far as I can see. I am, not only because of my external circumstances but even much more because of my essential nature, a reserved, silent, unsocial, dissatisfied person, but without being able to call this my misfortune, for it is only the reflection of my goal. Conclusions can at least be drawn from the sort of life I lead at home. Well, I live in my family, among the best and most lovable people, more strange than a stranger. I have not spoken an average of twenty words a day to my mother these last years, hardly ever said more than hello to my father. I do not speak at all to my married sisters and my brothers-in-law, and not because I have anything against them. The reason for it is simply this, that I have not the slightest thing to talk to them about. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it, for it disturbs me or delays me, if only because I think it does. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.

  A marriage could not change me, just as my job cannot change me.

  30 August. Where am I to find salvation? How many untruths I no longer even knew about will be brought to the surface. If they are going to pervade our marriage as they pervaded the good-bye, then I have certainly done the right thing. In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.59

  14 October. The little street began with the wall of a graveyard on the one side and a low house with a balcony on the other. In the house lived the pensioned official, Friedrich Munch, and his sister, Elizabeth.

  A herd of horses broke out of the enclosure.

  Two friends went for a morning ride.

  ‘Devils, save me from this benightedness!’ shouted an old merchant who had wearily lain down on the sofa in the evening and now, in the night, got up with difficulty only by calling upon all his strength. There was a hollow knock at the door. ‘Come in, come in, everything that is outside!’ he shouted.

  15 October. Perhaps I have caught hold of myself again, perhaps I secretly took the shorter way again, and now I, who already despair in loneliness, have pulled myself up again. But the headaches, the sleeplessness! Well, it is worth the struggle, or rather, I have no choice.

  The stay in Riva was very important to me. For the first time I understood a Christian girl and lived almost entirely within the sphere of her influence. I am incapable of writing down the important things that I need to remember. This weakness of mine makes my dull head clear and empty only in order to preserve itself, but only insofar as the confusion lets itself be crowded off to the periphery. But I almost prefer this condition to the merely dull and indefinite pressure the uncertain release from which first would require a hammer to crush me.

  Unsuccessful attempt to write to E. Weiss. And yesterday, in bed, the letter was boiling in my head.

  To sit in the corner of a tram, your coat wrapped around you.

  Prof. G. on the trip from Riva. His German-Bohemian nose reminding one of death, swollen, flushed, pimpled cheeks set on the bloodless leanness of his face, the blond, full beard around it. Possessed by a voracious appetite and thirst. The gulping down of the hot soup, the biting into and at the same time the licking of the unskinned heel of salami, the solemn gulps of the beer grown warm, the sweat breaking out around his nose. A loathsomeness that cannot be savoured to the full even by the greediest staring and sniffing.

  The house was already locked up. There was light in two windows on the second floor, and in one window on the fourth floor as well. A carriage stopped before the house. A young man stepped to the lighted window on the fourth floor, opened it, and looked down into the street. In the moonlight.

  It was already late in the evening. The student had lost all desire to continue working. Nor was it at all necessary, he had really made great progress the last few weeks, he could probably relax a little and reduce the amount of work he did at night. He closed his books and notebooks, arranged everything on his little table, and was about to undress and go to sleep. By accident, however, he looked towards the window, and when he saw the bright full moon it occurred to him that he might still take a short walk in the beautiful autumn night and somewhere or other, perhaps, refresh himself with a cup of black coffee. He turned out the lamp, took his hat, and opened the door to the kitchen. Usually it did not matter to him at all that he always had to go through the kitchen, this inconvenience also considerably reduced the rent of his room, but now and then, when there was an unusual amount of noise in the kitchen, or when, as today, he wanted to go out late in the evening, it was annoying.

  In despair. Today, in the half-asleep during the afternoon: In the end the pain will really burst my head. And at the temples. What I saw when I pictured this to myself was really a gunshot wound, but around the hole the jagged edges were bent straight back, as in the case of a tin can violently torn open.

  Don’t forget Kropotkin!60

  20 October. The unimaginable sadness in the morning. In the evening read Jacobsohn’s Der Fall Jacobsohn. This strength to live, to make decisions, joyfully to set one’s foot in the right place. He sits in himself the way a practised rower sits in his boat and would sit in any boat. I wanted to write to him.

  Instead of which I went for a walk, erased all the emotion I had absorbed in a conversation with Haas, whom I had run into, women excited me, I am now reading ‘The Metamorphosis’ at home and find it bad. Perhaps I am really lost, the sadness of this morning will return again, I shall not be able to resist it for long, it deprives me of all hope. I don’t even have the desire to keep a diary, perhaps because there is already too much lacking in it, perhaps because I should perpetually have to describe incomplete – by all appearances necessarily incomplete – actions, perhaps because writing itself adds to my sadness.

  I would gladly write fairy tales (why do I hate the word so?) that could please W. and that she might sometimes keep under the table at meals, read between courses, and blush fearfully when she noticed that

  the sanatorium doctor has been standing behind her for a little while now and watching her. Her excitement sometimes – or really all of the time – when she hears stories.

  I notice that I am afraid of the almost physical strain of the effort to remember, afraid of the pain beneath which the floor of the thoughtless vacuum of the mind slowly opens up, or even merely heaves up a little in preparation. All things resist being written down. If I knew that her commandment not to mention her were at work here (I have kept it faithfully, almost without effort), then I should be satisfied, but it is nothing but inability. Besides, what am I to think of the fact that this evening, for a long while, I was pondering what the acquaintance with W. had cost me in pleasures with the Russian woman, who at night perhaps (this is by no means impossible) might have let me into her room, which was diagonally across from mine. While my evening’s intercourse with W. was carried on in a language of knocks whose meaning we never definitely agreed upon. I knocked on the ceiling of my room below hers, received her answer, leaned out of the window, greeted her, once let myself be blessed by her, once snatched at a ribbon she let down, sat on the window sill for hours, heard every one of her steps above, mistakenly regarded every chance knock to be the sign of an understanding, heard her coughing, her singing before she fell asleep.

  21 October. Lost day. Visit to the Ringhoffer factory, Ehrenfels’s seminar, at Weltsch’s, dinner, walk, now here at ten o’clock. I keep thinking of the black beetle,61 but will not write.

  In the small harbour of a fishing village a barque was being fitted out for a voyage. A young man in wide sailor-trousers was supervising the work. Two old sailors were carrying sacks and chests to a gangplank where a tall man, his legs
spread wide, took everything and handed it over into hands that stretched towards him from the dark interior of the barque. On the large, square-hewn stones enclosing a corner of the dock, half reclining, sat five men, they blew the smoke of their pipes in all directions. From time to time the man in the wide sailor-trousers went up to them, made a little speech, and slapped them on the knees. Usually a wine jug was brought out from behind a stone in whose shade it was kept, and a glass of opaque red wine passed from man to man.

  22 October. Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in the boat. That was most beautiful of all. Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.

  Yesterday’s observation. The most appropriate situation for me: To listen to a conversation between two people who are discussing a matter that concerns them closely while I have only a very remote interest in it which is in addition completely selfless.

  26 October. The family sat at dinner. Through the uncurtained windows one could look out into the tropic night.

  ‘Who am I, then?’ I rebuked myself. I got up from the sofa upon which I had been lying with my knees drawn up, and sat erect. The door, which led straight from the stairway into my room, opened and a young man with a bowed head and searching eyes entered. He walked, as far as this was possible in the narrow room, in a curve around the sofa and stopped in the darkness of the corner near the window. I wanted to see what kind of apparition this was, went over, and grasped the man by the arm. He was a living person. He looked up – a little shorter than I – at me with a smile, the very carelessness with which he nodded and said ‘Just try me’ should have convinced me. Despite that, I seized him in front by the waistcoat and at the back by the jacket and shook him. His beautiful, strong, gold watch-chain attracted my attention, I grabbed it and pulled down on it so that the buttonhole to which it was fastened tore. He put up with this, simply looked down at the damage, tried in vain to keep the waistcoat button in the torn buttonhole. ‘What are you doing?’ he said finally, and showed me the waistcoat. ‘Just be quiet!’ I said threateningly.

  I began to run round the room, from a walk I passed into a trot, from a trot into a gallop, every time I passed the man I raised my fist to him. He did not even look at me but worked on his vest. I felt very free, even my breathing was extraordinary, my breast felt that only my clothes prevented it from heaving gigantically.

  For many months Wilhelm Menz, a book-keeper, had been intending to accost a girl whom he used regularly to meet on the way to the office in’ the morning on a very long street, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another. He had already become reconciled to the fact that this would remain an intention – he was not very bold in the presence of women and, besides, the morning was not a propitious time to speak to a girl who was in a hurry – when it happened that one evening, about Christmas time, he saw the girl walking right in front of him. ‘Miss,’ he said. She turned, recognized the man whom she always encountered in the morning, without stopping let her eye rest on him for a moment, and since Menz said nothing further, turned away again. They were in a brightly lit street in the midst of a great crowd’ of people and Menz was able, without attracting attention, to step up quite close to her. In this moment of decision Menz could think of nothing to say, but he was resolved to remain a stranger to the girl no longer, for he definitely intended to carry farther something begun so seriously, and so he made bold enough to tug at the bottom of the girl’s jacket. The girl suffered it as though nothing had happened.

  6 November. Whence the sudden confidence? If it would only remain! If I could go in and out of every door in this way, a passably erect person. Only I don’t know whether I want that.

  We didn’t want to tell our parents anything about it, but every evening after nine o’clock we met, I and two cousins, near the cemetery fence at a place where a little rise in the ground provided a good view.

  The iron fence of the cemetery leaves a large, grass-grown place free on the left.

  17 November. Dream: On a rising way, beginning at the left when seen from below, there lay, about at the middle of the slope and mostly in the road, a pile of rubbish or solidly packed clay that had crumbled lower and lower on the right while on the left it stood up as tall as the palings of a fence. I walked on the right where the way was almost clear and saw a man on a tricycle coming towards me from below and apparently riding straight at the obstacle. He was a man who seemed to have no eyes, at least his eyes looked like holes that had been effaced. The tricycle was rickety and went along in an uncertain and shaky fashion, but nevertheless without a sound, with almost exaggerated quietness and ease. I seized the man at the last moment, held him as though he were the handle-bars of his vehicle, and guided the latter into the gap through which I had come. Then he fell towards me, I was as large as a giant now and yet had an awkward hold on him, besides, the vehicle, as though out of control, began to move backwards, even if slowly, and pulled me after it. We went past an open van on which a number of people were standing crowded together, all dressed in dark clothes, among them a Boy Scout wearing a light-grey hat with the brim turned up. I expected this boy, whom I had already recognized at some distance, to help me, but he turned away and squeezed himself in among the people. Then, behind this open van – the tricycle kept rolling on and I, bent low, with legs astraddle, had to follow – there came towards me someone who brought me help, but whom I cannot remember. I only know that he was a trustworthy person who is now concealing himself as though behind a black cloth curtain and whose concealment I should respect.

  18 November. I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled – without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion – to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.

  Two dogs in a yard into which the sun shone hotly ran towards each other from opposite directions.

  Worried and slaved over the beginning of a letter to Miss Bl.

  19 November. The reading of the diary moves me. Is it because I no longer have the slightest confidence now? Everything appears to me to be an artificial construction of the mind. Every mark by someone else, every chance look throws everything in me over on the other side, even what has been forgotten, even what is entirely insignificant. I am more uncertain than I ever was, I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty. I am really like a lost sheep in the night and in the mountains, or like a sheep which is running after this sheep. To be so lost and not have the strength to regret it.

  I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores. Walking past them excites me, the remote but nevertheless existent possibility of going with one. Is that grossness? But I know no better, and doing this seems basically innocent to me and causes me almost no regret. I want only the stout, older ones, with outmoded clothes that have, however, a certain luxuriousness because of various adornments. One woman probably knows me by now. I met her this afternoon, she was not yet in her working clothes, her hair was still flat against her head, she was wearing no hat, a work blouse like a cook’s, and was carrying a bundle of some sort, perhaps to the laundress. No one would have found anything exciting in her, only me. We looked at each other fleetingly. Now, in the evening, it had meanwhile grown cold, I saw her, wearing a tight-fitting, yellowish-brown coat, on the other side of the narrow street that branches off from Zeltnerstrasse, where she has her beat. I looked back at her twice, she caught the glance too, but then I really ran away from her.

  This uncertainty is surely the result of thinking about F.

  20 November. Was at the cinema. Lolotte. The good minister. The little bicycle. The reconciliation of the parents. Was tremendously entertained. Before it, a sad film, The Accident on the Dock, after it, the gay Alone at Last. Am entirely empty and insensible, the passing tram has more living feeling
.

  21 November. Dream: The French cabinet, four men, is sitting around a table. A conference is taking place. I remember the man sitting on the long right side of the table, with his face flattened out in profile, yellowish-coloured skin, his very straight nose jutting far forward (jutting so far forward because of the flatness of his face) and an oily, black, heavy moustache arching over his mouth.

  Miserable observation which again is certainly the result of something artificially constructed whose lower end is swinging in emptiness somewhere: When I picked up the inkwell from the desk to carry it into the living-room I felt a sort of firmness in me, just as, for instance, the corner of a tall building appears in the mist and at once disappears again. I did not feel lost, something waited in me that was independent of people, even of F. What would happen if I were to run away, as one sometimes runs through the fields?

  These predictions, this imitating of models, this fear of something definite, is ridiculous. These are constructions that even in the imagination, where they are alone sovereign, only approach the living surface but then are always suddenly driven under. Who has the magic hand to thrust into the machinery without its being torn to pieces and scattered by a thousand knives?

  I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.

  24 November. Evening before last at Max’s. He is becoming more and more a stranger, he has often been one to me, now I am becoming one to him too. Yesterday evening simply went to bed.

  A dream towards morning: I am sitting in the garden of a sanatorium at a long table, at the very head, and in the dream I actually see my back. It is a gloomy day, I must have gone on a trip and am in a motor-car that arrived a short time ago, driving up in a curve to the front of the platform. They are just about to bring in the food when I see one of the waitresses, a young, delicate girl wearing a dress the colour of autumn leaves, approaching with a very light or unsteady step through the pillared hall that served as the porch of the sanatorium, and going down into the garden. I don’t yet know what she wants but nevertheless point questioningly at myself to learn whether she wants me. And in fact she brings me a letter. I think, this can’t be the letter I’m expecting, it is a very thin letter and a strange, thin, unsure handwriting. But I open it and a great number of thin sheets covered in writing come out, all of them in the strange handwriting. I begin to read, leaf through the pages, and recognize that it must be a very important letter and apparently from F.’s youngest sister. I eagerly begin to read, then my neighbour on the right, I don’t know whether man or woman, probably a child, looks down over my arm at the letter. I scream, ‘No!’ The round table of nervous people begins to tremble. I have probably caused a disaster. I attempt to apologize with a few hasty words in order to be able to go on with the reading. I bend over my letter again, only to wake up without resistance, as if awakened by my own scream. With complete awareness I force myself to fall asleep again, the scene reappears, in fact I quickly read two or three more misty lines of the letter, nothing of which I remember, and lose the dream in further sleep.