The Diaries of Franz Kafka (19 page)

My repugnance for antitheses is certain. They are unexpected, but do not surprise, for they have always been there; if they were unconscious, it was at the very edge of consciousness. They make for thoroughness, fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the ‘wheel of life’,
³⁵
we have chased our little idea around the circle. They are as undifferentiated as they are different, they grow under one’s hand as though bloated by water, beginning with the prospect of infinity, they always end up in the same medium size. They curl up, cannot be straightened out, are mere clues, are holes in wood, are immobile assaults, draw antitheses to themselves, as I have shown. If they would only draw all of them, and forever.

For the drama: Weise, English teacher, the way he hurried by with squared shoulders, his hands deep in his pockets, his yellowish overcoat tightly folded, crossing the tracks with powerful strides right in front of the trolley that still stood there but was already signalling its departure with its bell. Away from us.

21 November. My former governess, the one with the black-and-yellow face, with the square nose and a wart on her cheek which used to delight me so, was at our house today for the second time recently to see me. The first time I wasn’t home, this time I wanted to be left in peace and to sleep and made them tell her I was out. Why did she bring me up so badly, after all I was obedient, she herself is saying so now to the cook and the governess in the ante-room, I was good and had a quiet disposition. Why didn’t she use this to my advantage and prepare a better future for me? She is a married woman or a widow, has children, has a lively way of speaking that doesn’t let me sleep, thinks I am a tall, healthy gentleman at the beautiful age of twenty-eight who likes to remember his youth and in general knows what to do with himself. Now, however, I lie here on the sofa, kicked out of
the world, watching for the sleep that refuses to come and will only graze me when it does, my joints ache with fatigue, my dried-up body trembles toward its own destruction in turmoils of which I dare not become fully conscious, in my head are astonishing convulsions. And there stand the three women before my door, one praises me as I was, two as I am. The cook says I shall go straight – she means without any detour – to heaven. This it shall be.

Löwy: A rabbi in the Talmud made it a principle, in this case very pleasing to God, to accept nothing, not even a glass of water, from anyone. Now it happened, however, that the greatest rabbi of his time wanted to make his acquaintance and therefore invited him to a meal. To refuse the invitation of such a man, that was impossible. The first rabbi therefore set out sadly on his journey. But because his principle was so strong, a mountain raised itself up between the two rabbis.

It is certain that a major obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. Nothing can be accomplished with such a body. I shall have to get used to its perpetual balking. As a result of the last few nights spent in wild dreams but with scarcely a few snatches of sleep, I was so incoherent this morning, felt nothing but my forehead, saw a halfway bearable condition only far beyond my present one, and in sheer readiness to die would have been glad simply to have curled up in a ball on the cement floor of the corridor with the documents in my hand. My body is too long for its weakness, it hasn’t the least bit of fat
to engender a blessed warmth, to preserve an inner fire, no fat on which the spirit could occasionally nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole. How shall the weak heart that lately has troubled me so often be able to pound the blood through all the length of these legs? It would be labour enough to the knees, and from there it can only spill with a senile strength into the cold lower parts of my legs. But now it is already needed up above again, it is being waited for, while it is wasting itself down below. Everything is pulled apart throughout the length of my body. What could it accomplish then, when it perhaps wouldn’t have enough strength for what I want to achieve even if it were shorter and more compact.

From a letter of Löwy’s to his father: When I come to Warsaw I will walk about among you in my European clothes like ‘a spider before your eyes, like a mourner at a wedding’.

Löwy tells a story about a married friend who lives in Postin, a small town near Warsaw, and who feels isolated in his progressive interests and therefore unhappy.

‘Postin, is that a large city?’

‘This large,’ he holds out the palm of his hand to me. It is covered by a rough yellow-brown glove and looks like a wasteland.

23 November. On the 21st, the hundredth anniversary of Kleist’s death, the Kleist family had a wreath placed on his grave with the epitaph: ‘To the best of their house.’

On what circumstances my way of life makes me dependent! Tonight I slept somewhat better than in the past week, this afternoon even fairly well, I even feel that drowsiness which follows moderately good Sleep, consequently I am afraid I shall not be able to write as well, feel individual abilities turning more deeply inward, and am prepared for any surprise, that is, I already see it.

24 November.
Shechite
(one who is learning the slaughterer’s art). Play by Gordin. In it quotations from the Talmud, for example:

If a great scholar commits a sin during the evening or the night, by
morning you are no longer permitted to reproach him with it, for in his scholarship he has already repented of it himself.

If you steal an ox then you must return two, if you slaughter the stolen ox then you must return four, but if you slaughter a stolen calf then you must return only three because it is assumed that you had to carry the calf away, therefore had done hard work. This assumption influences the punishment even if the calf was led away without any difficulty.

Honesty of evil thoughts. Yesterday evening I felt especially miserable. My stomach was upset again. I had written with difficulty. I had listened with effort to Löwy’s reading in the coffee-house (which at first was quiet so that we had to restrain ourselves, but which then became full of bustle and gave us no peace), the dismal future immediately before me seemed not worth entering, abandoned, I walked through Ferdinandstrasse. Then at the junction with the Bergstein I once more thought about the more distant future. How would I live through it with this body picked up in a lumber room? The Talmud too says: A man without a woman is no person. I had no defence this evening against such thoughts except to say to myself: ‘It is now that you come, evil thoughts, now, because I am weak and have an upset stomach. You pick this time for me to think you. You have waited for your advantage. Shame on you. Come some other time, when I am stronger. Don’t exploit my condition in this way.’ And, in fact, without even waiting for other proofs, they yielded, scattered slowly and did not again disturb me during the rest of my walk, which was, naturally, not too happy. They apparently forgot, however, that if they were to respect all my evil moments, they would seldom get their chance.

The odour of petrol from a motor-car driving towards me from the theatre made me notice how visibly a beautiful home life (and were it lit by a single candle, that is all one needs before going to bed) is waiting for the theatre-goers coming towards me who are giving their cloaks and dangling opera glasses a last tug into place, but also how it seems that they are being sent home from the theatre like subordinates before whom the curtain has gone down for the last time and behind whom the doors have opened through which – full of pride because of
some ridiculous worry or another – they had entered the theatre before the beginning of or during the first act.

28 November. Have written nothing for three days.

Spent all afternoon of the 25th in the Café City persuading M. to sign a declaration that he was just a clerk with us, therefore not covered by insurance, so that Father would not be obliged to make the large payment on his insurance. He promises it, I speak fluent Czech, I apologize for my mistakes with particular elegance, he promises to send the declaration to the office Monday, I feel that if he does not like me then at least he respects me, but on Monday he sends nothing, nor is he any longer in Prague, he has left.

Dull evening at Baum’s without Max. Reading of
Die Hässliche
, a story that is still too disorganized, the first chapter is rather the building-site of a story.

On Sunday, 26 November.
Richard and Samuel
with Max morning and afternoon until five. Then to N., a collector from Linz, recommended by Kubin, fifty, gigantic, towerlike movements; when he is silent for any length of time one bows one’s head, for he is entirely silent, while when he speaks he does not speak entirely; his life consists of collecting and fornicating.

Collecting: He began with a collection of postage stamps, then turned to drawings, then collected everything, then saw the aimlessness of this collection which could never be completed and limited himself to amulets, later to pilgrimage medals and pilgrimage tracts from lower Austria and southern Bavaria. These are medals and tracts which are issued anew for each pilgrimage, most of them worthless in their material and also artistically, but often have nice pictures. He now also began industriously to write about them, and indeed was the first to write on this subject, for the systematization of which he first established the points of reference. Naturally, those who had been collecting these objects and had put off publishing were furious, but had to put up with it nevertheless. Now he is an acknowledged expert on these pilgrimage medals, requests come from all over for his opinion and decision on these medals, his voice is decisive. Besides, he collects everything else as well, his pride is a chastity belt that, together with his amulets, was exhibited at the Dresden Hygienic Exhibition. (He
has just been there to have everything packed for shipment.) Then a beautiful knight’s sword of the Falkensteiners. His relationship to art is unambiguous and clear in that bad way which collecting makes possible.

From the coffee-house in the Hotel Graf he takes us up to his overheated room, sits down on the bed, we on two chairs around him, so that we form a quiet group. His first question: ‘Are you collectors?’

‘No, only poor amateurs.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ He pulls out his wallet and practically showers us with book-plates, his own and others’, jumbled with announcements of his next book,
Magic and Superstition in the Mineral Kingdom
. He has already written much, especially on ‘Motherhood in Art’, he considers the pregnant body the most beautiful, for him it is also the most pleasant to f—. He has also written about amulets. He was also in the employ of the Vienna Court Museum, was in charge of excavations in Braila at the mouth of the Danube, invented a process, named after him, for restoring excavated vases, is a member of thirteen learned societies and museums, his collection is willed to the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg, he often sits at his desk until one or two o’clock at night and is back at eight o’clock in the morning. We have to write something in a lady friend’s album which he has brought along to fill up on his journey. Those who themselves create come first. Max writes a complicated verse which Mr N. tries to render by the proverb, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Before this, he had read it aloud in a wooden voice. I write down:

He reads aloud again, I help, finally he says: ‘A Persian rhythm? Now what is that called? Ghazel? Right.’ We are not in a position to agree with this nor even to guess at what he means. Finally he quotes a ‘
ritornello
by Rückert’. Yes, he meant
ritornello
. However, it is not that either. Very well, but it has a certain melody.

He is a friend of Halbe. He likes to talk about him. We would much rather talk about Blei. There is not much to say about him, however, Munich literary society does not think much of him because of his intellectual double-crossing, he is divorced from his wife who had had a large practice as a dentist and supported him, his daughter, sixteen,
blonde, with blue eyes, is the wildest girl in Munich. In Sternheim’s
Hose
– N. was at the theatre with Halbe – Blei played an ageing man-about-town. When N. met him the next day he said: ‘Herr Doktor, yesterday you played Dr Blei.’

‘What? What?’ he said in embarrassment, ‘but I was playing so-and-so.’

When we leave he throws open the bed so that it may thoroughly take on the warmth of the room, he arranges for additional heating besides.

29 November. From the Talmud: When a scholar goes to meet his bride, he should take an
am ha-aretz
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along, he is too deeply sunk in his scholarliness, he would not observe what should be observed.