1910
The onlookers freeze when the train goes by.
“If he ever asked me” the a released from the sentence flew off like a ball on the meadow.
His seriousness kills me. His head in its collar, his hair arranged motionless on the skull, the muscles down at his cheeks stretched in their place
Are the woods still there? Something of the woods was still there. But my gaze was barely ten steps in when I gave up again, caught by the boring conversation.
In the dark woods, on the sodden ground, I found my way only by the white of his collar.
In a dream I asked the dancer Eduardova if she might dance the csardas just once more. She had a broad stripe of shadow or light in the middle of her face, between the lower edge of her forehead and the center of her chin. Just then someone came in, with the repulsive motions of an unconscious schemer, to tell her that the train was leaving right away. From the way she listened to the news, it was horribly clear to me that she would no longer dance. “I’m a bad, awful woman, aren’t I?” she said. Oh no, I said, not that, and turned in no particular direction to go.
Before I had questioned her about the many flowers stuck in her girdle. “They are from all the princes of Europe,” she said. I thought over what that might mean, that these flowers stuck fresh in her girdle had been given to the dancer Eduardova by all the princes of Europe.
The dancer Eduardova, a lover of music, travels on the electric trams as everywhere else accompanied by two violinists, whom she often has play. For there is no regulation that forbids one from playing on the trams if the playing is good, pleasant for fellow passengers and costs nothing—that is, if nothing is collected afterward. However, it is a bit surprising at the start, and for a little while everyone finds it inappropriate. But at full speed, in a strong draft of air along silent streets, it sounds lovely.
The dancer Eduardova is not so pretty outdoors as on the stage. Her pallid color, those cheekbones stretching her skin so taut that there is scarcely any movement in her face, her large nose—rising as if from a deep hollow—which can’t be made into a joke, like examining the hardness of its tip or grabbing it lightly by the bridge and pulling her this way and that, saying, “Well, come along now!”, her broad figure with its high waist in far too pleated skirts—who could like that?—she almost looks like one of my aunts, an elderly lady; many people’s older aunts look like that. In fact there is no compensation at all for these disadvantages in the dancer Eduardova outdoors; aside from her quite good feet, there is really nothing that might command rapture, or amazement, or even respect. And so I have very often seen Eduardova treated with an indifference that even gentlemen who were otherwise very elegant and well-mannered could not hide, although they naturally made great efforts to do so for the sake of such a well-known dancer, which, after all, Eduardova was.
The auricle of my ear felt fresh, rough, cool, succulent to the touch, like a leaf.
I write this most surely from despair over my body and over the future with this body
If despair presents itself so surely, so tied to its object, so restrained, as if by a soldier who covers the retreat and lets himself be blown up for it, then it is not true despair. True despair always immediately overtakes its target, (at this comma it becomes clear that only the first sentence was true)
Are you desperate?
Yes? You’re desperate?
You’re running away? You want to hide?
I went past the brothel as if going past the house of a lover
Authors speak a stench
The seamstresses in the pouring rain
Out the train compartment window
Finally, after five months of my life in which I could write nothing that would satisfy me and for which no power will compensate me, though all were obliged to do so, I come once again to the idea of addressing myself. I have always answered whenever I really asked myself, there was always something here to blaze out of me, out of this heap of straw that I have been for five months, whose fate, it seems, is to be set alight in summer and burn up faster than the spectators can blink. If only that could happen to me! And it should happen to me ten times over, for I don’t even regret this unhappy time. My condition is not unhappiness, but it is not happiness either, not indifference, not weakness, not exhaustion, not another interest, so what on earth is it? That I don’t know likely connects with my inability to write. And I believe I understand this without knowing its cause. Anything that comes to my mind comes just like this, not from the root, but only from somewhere around its middle. Let someone try to hold it then, let someone try to hold onto a stem of grass that has begun to grow only from its middle. This could perhaps be done by certain Japanese acrobats, for instance, climbing on a ladder that lies not on the ground, but on the raised soles of one half lying, and which does not lean on a wall but simply goes up into the air. I can’t do that—apart from my ladder not even having any soles available to it. Naturally that isn’t all of it, and such a question still doesn’t bring me to speak. But every day at least one line should be trained on me, as telescopes are trained on comets. And if I should then appear before that sentence, lured by that sentence, as I was last Christmas, for instance, when I was so far gone that I just barely kept hold of myself, and when I really seemed on the last rung of my ladder, though it rested quietly on the ground and against the wall. But what ground! What a wall! And yet the ladder did not fall, my feet pressed it so well to the ground, my feet lifted it so well to the wall.
Today, for instance, I was rude three times, once to a conductor, once to someone introduced to me—so there were only 2, but they pain me like a stomachache. Coming from anyone else it would have been rude; how much more so coming from me. So I went outside myself, struggled in the air, in the fog and the irritation that no one had noticed that even with my companions I had committed the rudeness as a rudeness, that I had to commit it, had to carry the true expression, the responsibility; but the worst was when one of my acquaintances took the rudeness not as a sign of character but as character itself, drew my attention to the rudeness and admired it. Why do I not stay within myself? Though now I say to myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and the man you were introduced to kept calm, the latter even said goodbye as you went off. But that means nothing. You can achieve nothing when you fail yourself, but what else do you miss in your own circle? To this speech I answer only: even I would rather suffer blows inside the circle than strike blows myself outside of it, but where the hell is this circle—for a while, yes, I saw it lying on the earth, as if squirted out with chalk, but now it just hangs like this around me, it doesn’t even hang at all.
17/18 (18/19) May (1910) night of comets
Together with Blei, his wife and his child, now and then listened to myself from outside myself, in passing: like the whining of a young cat, but at least something.
How many days have passed again in silence; today is the 29th of May. Do I not even have the resolve to take this penholder, this piece of wood, daily in hand? I really believe I don’t have it. I row, ride, swim, lie in the sun. So my calves are good, my thighs not bad, my stomach still getting by, but my chest is just pitiful, and if my head down into the neck
Sunday, 19 July slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life
When I think it over, I must say that my education has in many ways done me great harm. Certainly I was not educated anywhere out of the way, perhaps in some ruins in the mountains—against that I wouldn’t be able to say one word of reproach. At the risk of my entire series of past teachers failing to grasp this, I would gladly, much more gladly, have been such a little inhabitant of the ruins, burnt up by the sun that would shine on me there, between the rubble on all sides, over the warm ivy, even if I were weakened in the beginning under the pressure of my good qualities, which would sprout up in me with the strength of weeds
When I think it over, I must say that my education has in many ways done me great harm. This reproach falls on a number of people, namely my parents, some relatives, the occasional visitor to our house, various writers, one particular cook who drove me to school for a year, a heap of teachers (whom I must press close together in my recollection, otherwise some would escape me here and there, but since I have crowded them so close together, it all crumbles back apart piece by piece), a school inspector, slowly walking passersby; in short, this reproach winds its way like a dagger through society and no one, I repeat, unfortunately no one can be sure that the dagger’s point will not suddenly appear from before, from behind, or from the side. I will not listen to any objections against this reproach; since I have already heard too many and since I have even been refuted by most of the objections, I take these objections into my reproach and now declare: my education and these refutations have in all manner of ways done me great harm.
Often I consider it, and then I always have to say that my education has in large part done me great harm. This complaint goes out against a number of people, in fact they stand here together, not knowing what to do with one another, as in old group pictures; it doesn’t even occur to them to cast down their eyes, and because of anticipation they don’t dare to smile. There are my parents, some relatives, some teachers, one particular cook, some girls at dancing school, some visitors to our house from earlier times, some writers, a swimming teacher, a ticket seller, a school inspector, then certain people I met just once on the street, and others I just can’t recall, and the sort that I will never again recall, and finally the sort whose instruction I never noticed at all, being somehow distracted at the time; in short, they are so very many that one must take care not to name any of them twice. And I pronounce my reproach against them all, in this way I make them known to one another, but I will tolerate no objections. For honestly I have borne enough objections already, and since I have already been refuted by most of them, I can do nothing but take up these very refutations into my complaint and say that, apart from my education, these refutations also have in large part done me great harm.
Perhaps one might expect that I was educated somewhere out of the way? No, I was educated in the middle of the city, in the middle of the city. Not, for instance, in a ruin in the mountains, nor by the sea. Until now my parents and their retinue were covered by my reproach, and gray; now they easily push it aside and laugh, since I have drawn my hands away from them to my forehead and think: I should have been that little inhabitant of the ruins, listening to the shrieking of the jackdaws, glanced over by their shadows, cooled down under the moon, burnt up by the sun that would shine on me amid the rubble all around my ivy bed, even if I were weakened in the beginning under the pressure of my good qualities, which would surely have sprouted up in me with the strength of weeds.
I consider it often and let my thoughts take their course, without mixing myself up in them, and always, however I turn it over, I come to the conclusion that my education has in large part done me terrible harm. In this realization lodges a reproach that goes out against a number of people. There are my parents, my relatives, one particular cook, my teachers, some writers, friendly families, a swimming teacher, locals at the summer resort, some women in the city park from whom you just wouldn’t expect it, a barber, a beggar woman, a helmsman, the family doctor, and still many others, and there would be still more if I wanted to or were able to call them all by name, in short there are so many that one must take care not to name anyone in the crowd twice. Now one might think that because of this great number a reproach would lose its stability, that it simply must lose its stability, since a reproach is no field general, it just goes out straight ahead and doesn’t know how to distribute itself. Especially in this case, where it is aimed at people in the past. These people could be held fast in memory, with a forgotten energy, but they would have scarcely more than a floor under them, even their legs would simply turn to smoke. And in this sort of situation one cannot reproach people, not with the least use, that once in an earlier time they had something to do with the education of a youth who is now as incomprehensible to them as they are to us. But they can’t even be brought to remember any particular time, they can’t remember anything, and if you close in on them they silently push you to the side, no one can force them to it, but obviously one can’t speak of force at all, since most likely they don’t even hear the words. They stand there like tired dogs, since it uses up all their power just to remain upright in memory. But if you were actually to bring them to hear and to speak, then their counter-reproaches would only whistle in your ears, for people take the conviction of reverence for the dead with them into the hereafter, and from there they defend it ten times as strongly. And if this opinion is perhaps incorrect, if the dead have some particular awe for the living, then accordingly they would just take sides with their own living past, which stands right beside them; and again our ears would whistle. And if this opinion is also incorrect, if in fact the dead are completely impartial, then for sure they would never suffer you to disturb them with unprovable reproaches. For such reproaches are completely unprovable, even from person to person. Not even the existence of past mistakes in one’s education can be proved, let alone their authorship. And now show me a reproach that, in such a situation, does not turn into a sigh.
That is the reproach that I have to raise. It has a sound core, theory supports it. But what has really been spoiled in me I forget for now, or I forgive, and make no fuss about it. On the other hand, I can prove at any time that my education tried to make a different person out of me than what I have become. It is the harm that my educators could have inflicted on me in following their intentions that I bring to them as a reproach, I demand from their hands the person that I am now, and since they cannot give him to me, I make out of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat into the world beyond. Yet all this only serves another purpose. The reproach that they have spoiled a part of me, have spoiled a good and beautiful part of me—in dreams it sometimes appears to me, as a dead bride appears to others—this reproach, that is always on the point of becoming a sigh, should above all come across as the honest reproach that it really is. So it happens that the great reproach, to which nothing can happen, takes the small one by the hand, the greater walks, the smaller hops, but the small one does get there, it still distinguishes itself just as we always expected, and the trumpet blows for the drums.
I consider it often, and let my thoughts take their course without mixing myself up in them, but always I come to the conclusion that my education has spoiled me more than I can understand. Outwardly I am a person like any other, since my physical education was kept just as close to the usual as my body too was usual, and even if I am fairly small and a bit fat, I am still pleasant to many, even to girls. There is nothing to say about that. Just recently one of them said something very reasonable: “Oh, if I could see you naked there just once, you must be so handsome and kissable,” she said. But if I was missing my upper lip there, my earlobe here, a finger there, if I had hairless spots on my head and pockmarks on my face, still it would not adequately correspond to my inner imperfection. This imperfection is not inherent, and because of that is all the more painful to bear. For like everyone, I too have my center of gravity in me from birth onwards, which even the maddest education cannot unsettle. I still have this good center of gravity but, as it were, no longer the accompanying body. And a center of gravity that has nothing to work at turns to lead and lodges in the body like a bullet. But this imperfection is not even deserved; through no fault of mine, I have had to suffer through its emergence. I cannot even find in myself any remorse, no matter how I seek it out. For remorse would be good for me, it cries out, yes, cries itself right out; it takes pain to the side and works through everything on its own, as an affair of honor; we remain upright only because it lightens our load.
My imperfection is, as I said, not inherent, not deserved; in spite of that I bear it better than others, under greater labor of the imagination, with selected aids, bear much smaller misfortune—a horrible wife, for example, impoverished circumstances, miserable jobs—and I am not at all black in the face from despair over it, but rather white and red
I would not be this way if my education had forced itself as far into me as it wished. Perhaps my youth was too brief for it, in which case I praise its brevity even now, in my forties, with all my heart. Only through this was I able to retain the strength to become aware of the losses of my youth, further, to accept these losses, further, to raise a reproach against the past on all sides and, finally, to keep a remnant of my strength for myself. But all these strengths are, again, only a remnant of those which I possessed as a child and which exposed me more than others to the spoilers of youth, yes, a good racing car is the first to be pursued and overtaken by dust and wind, and its wheels fly past the obstacles, so that one could almost believe in love.
What I still am now becomes most clear to me by how strongly the reproaches will themselves out of me. There were times when I had nothing else in me but reproaches driven by rage, so although sound in body, I held fast to strange people in the street because the reproaches inside me were throwing themselves from side to side, like water carried quickly in a basin.
Those times are past. The reproaches lie around in me like strange implements which I barely have the courage to grasp and lift any longer. And the ruin of my old education seems to work inside me anew, more and more; the craving to remember, perhaps a common quality of bachelors of my age, opens my heart back up to everyone whom my reproaches should strike, and an event like yesterday’s, once as common as eating, is now so rare that I make a note of it.
But still above and beyond that, I myself, I who have now put aside the pen to open the window, am perhaps the best assistant to my attackers. For I underestimate myself, and that already means overestimating others, but still I overestimate them in other ways, and aside from that I still do myself direct harm. If the drive for reproach overcomes me, I look out the window. Who could deny that the fishermen sit there in their boats, like schoolboys who have been taken from school to the river; well, their holding still is often incomprehensible, like that of flies on windowpanes. And naturally the electric trams go over the bridge as always, with the coarse drunkenness of wind, and they chime like spoiled clocks, and no doubt the policeman, black from top to bottom with the yellow light of the badge on his chest, is reminiscient of nothing else but hell, and now with thoughts similar to mine he regards a fisherman who suddenly—he cries out, or he has a vision, or his cork twitches—bends to the edge of the boat. All that is well and good, but in its own time; now only the reproaches are true.
They go out against a number of people, it can really be frightening, and not only I but everyone else would rather look out the open window onto the river. There are my parents and relatives—it makes their guilt still greater that they harmed me out of love, for how much could they have helped me out of love—then friendly families with evil looks, making themselves heavy out of their sense of guilt, they will not rise up in memory, then the swarm of nannies, the teachers and writers and one particular cook in their midst; then, blending into one another as punishment, a family doctor, a barber, a helmsman, a beggarwoman, a paper salesman, a park attendant, a swimming teacher, then strange women in the city park of whom it just wouldn’t be expected, locals at the summer resort as a mockery of innocent nature, and many others; but there would be still more if I could or wanted to call all of them by name, in short they are so many that one must take care not to name any of them twice.
I consider it often, and let my thoughts take their course without mixing myself up in them, but always I come to the same conclusion, that my education has spoiled me more than all the people I know and more than I can grasp. But I can say this only once in a long while, for if I am asked afterward: “Really? Is that true? Could anyone believe that?” out of nervous terror I immediately seek to limit it.
Outwardly I look like anyone else; I have legs, torso and head, trousers, jacket and hat; they had me do the proper gymnastics and if I have nonetheless remained a bit small and weak, there was just no avoiding it. In any case, many like me, even young girls, and those who don’t like me still find me bearable.
It is reported, and we are inclined to believe, that men in danger care nothing even for beautiful strange women; they push them against the wall, push them with head and hands, knees and elbows, if they are at all blocked by these women in their flight out of the burning theater. There our chatty women fall silent, their endless talk gets its verb and period, their eyebrows rise up from their resting positions, the movement of breath in their thighs and hips breaks off, more air than usual goes into their mouths, only loosely shut from fear, and their cheeks seem a little puffed out.
Sand: the French are all comedians; but only the weakest among them perform comedy
Claqueurs in the French theaters: commanders-in-chief on the ground floor. Ha-Ha for the next, dropping newspaper for the gallery men
Wooden mallet announces the start
When it was becoming unbearable - toward one evening in November - and I ran over the narrow rug of my room as along a racetrack, again took fright at the sight of the illuminated street, and yet again found a new destination in the depths of the room at the back of the mirror, and cry out, just to hear the cry, which is answered by nothing and which also relieves nothing of the cry’s force, so that it rises up without a counterweight and cannot stop even if it falls silent, then the door opened out from the wall, so hastily, since haste was badly needed, and even the cart-horses down on the pavement raised themselves on their spread hind legs like horses turned wild in some battle, their throats surrendered.
Like a small ghost, a child came down the wholly dark corridor in which the lamp was not yet lit and stopped, standing on tiptoe like a ballerina, on an imperceptibly swaying floor beam. Instantly blinded by the twilight of the room, she quickly moved to cover her face with her hands, but unexpectedly calmed on seeing the window, before whose crossbars the upwelling smoke of the streetlights below had at last came to rest beneath the darkness. The child supported herself with her right elbow against the wall of the room, in front of the open door, and let the draft from outside waft around her ankles, and her neck, and her temples.
I gave her a short glance, then said “Good day” and took my jacket from the fire screen, since I didn’t want to stand there half undressed. I held my mouth open for a short while, so that my anxiety might depart through it. I had bad saliva in me, my eyelashes trembled in my face, I felt a strain in the corner of my forehead as if from a painless bullet wound, in short I lacked nothing but this nonetheless expected visit.
The child was still standing at the wall in the same place, she had pressed her right hand against the plaster and, her cheeks entirely red, could not get enough of the whitewashed wall’s rough grain, she rubbed her fingertips against it and looked at them over and over.
I said: Do you actually want something with me? It’s not some mistake? Nothing easier than a mistake in this large house. My name is so and so, I live on the third floor in room number 11. So am I the one you want to visit?
“Quiet, quiet,” said the child over her shoulder, “everything is all right.”
“Then come farther inside the room, I’d like to shut the door”
“I shut the door just now, don’t go to any trouble, calm down all around.”
Don’t speak of trouble. But a number of people live along this walkway, naturally they are all my acquaintances; most of them are now coming from their businesses; if they hear talking in a room, they simply believe they have the right to come to the door and look in on what’s happening. That’s just how it is. These people have their daily work behind them, who can tell them what to do in the temporary freedom of their evenings? Anyhow, you know this perfectly well. So let me shut the door
Now what is it? What’s the matter with you? For all I care, the whole house can come in here. And once again, I’ve already shut the door, do you think that only you can shut doors? I’ve even turned the key to lock it.
That’s just fine, then. I don’t want anything more. You didn’t even have to turn the key. And now go on and make yourself comfortable, if you’re already here. You are my guest, trust me entirely. Just make yourself at home, don’t fear. I won’t force you either to stay here or to go away. Do I really have to say this? Do you know me so little?
No, you really didn’t have to say that. What’s more, you absolutely shouldn’t have said it. I’m a child, why make such a fuss over me?
It’s not so terrible. Naturally a child, though you aren’t that young at all. You’re already quite grown up. Don’t take this the wrong way, you’re just at an unpleasant age for me. If you were an older girl, you couldn’t so easily lock yourself up with me in my room. It would mean you were attracted to me
We mustn’t worry ourselves over that. I want to say now that I know you well, but it hardly protects me, it only relieves you the effort of telling me some lie. But in spite of that you make compliments to me, stop that, I implore you, stop that. The truth is that I don’t know you everywhere and all the time, even in this darkness. It would be much better if you let the lights come on. No, better not. But at least I will take note that you have threatened me already.
What? Have I threatened you? But please. I’m so glad that you’re finally here. I say finally, because it’s already so late. I can’t understand why you have come so late. So it’s possible that in my happiness I spoke in some confused way and that you understood it too literally. I’ll admit ten times that I said something like that, even that I threatened you, anything, whatever you like. - Only no arguing with a guest. - But how could you take it as true, how could you hurt me so, why would you want to spoil with all your force the short time for which you are here. A stranger would be more accommodating than you.
That I believe, that’s no flash of genius, no stranger can accommodate you so near as I can by nature. You already know that, so what’s all this melancholy for? If you say that you want to play a comedy, I will go immediately
So you dare to tell me that as well? You are a little too bold. After all, you’re still in my room. You’re rubbing your fingers like mad on my wall. My room, my wall. And aside from that, it’s not just rude what you’re saying with that laugh. You say your nature forces you to speak this way to me. Really? Your nature forces you? That’s nice of your nature. But just what is your nature? Your nature is my nature, and if am friendly to you by nature, then you also can do nothing else
Is that friendly?
I’m talking about earlier.
Do you know how I will be later
I don’t know anything.
And I went over to the nightstand, where I lit the candle. (At that time I had neither gas nor electric light in my room.) Then I sat for a while at the table until I grew tired of it as well, pulled on my overcoat, took my hat from the sofa and blew out the candle. Going out, I got tangled up with a chair leg. On the stairs I met a tenant from the same floor. You’re going away yet again, you rascal, he said, resting his spread legs over two steps. “What should I do,” I said, “just now I had a ghost in my room.” You say that with the same displeasure as if you had found a hair in your soup. - You’re joking, but take note of this, a ghost is a ghost. - Very true. But what if one doesn’t believe in ghosts at all. - So then you think I believe in ghosts?
The little inhabitant of the ruins.
You, I said, and gave him a small push with my knee (at this sudden speech a bit of saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen) don’t fall asleep.
Yes I want out, want up the stairs, even if it has to be by somersaults. I expect from society everything that I lack, above all the organization of my strength; the kind of heightened experience that is the only opportunity for the bachelor on the street is not enough. He is satisfied just to stand firm with his pitiful, though solid, physicality, to guard his few meals, to avoid the influence of others, in short to retain as much as is possible in this dissolving world. But whatever he loses he then seeks out by force, even if it is changed and weakened, yes, even if he gets back his earlier property only in appearance (as is usually the case). His essence is thus suicidal - it has teeth only for its own flesh, and flesh only for its own teeth. For without a center, without a job, a love, a family, a pension, that is, without holding one’s own against the world in the biggest matters, as an experiment of course, as it were to astound it by means of a great complex of possessions, one cannot protect oneself from instantly destructive losses. This bachelor with his thin clothes, his art of prayer, his tireless legs, his fearful rented room, his pieced-together essence which once more, after a long stretch of time, is again called forth—he holds all this together with both arms, and is sure to lose two of these things if he happens to catch any few others. Naturally the truth lies here, the truth nowhere so clear to see. For whoever really appears as a finished citizen thereby travels in a ship over the sea, with spray before him and his wake behind—that is, with great effect all around, entirely different from the man on his few bits of wood in the waves, crashing into one another and pushing each other down—but he, this gentleman and citizen, is in no lesser danger. For he and his property are not one, but two, and whoever shatters this bond shatters him with it. Of course we and our acquaintances are unrecognizable in this respect since we are completely hidden; I, for instance, am currently hidden by my job, by my imagined or real sorrows, by my literary inclinations, and so on. But I myself feel my bedrock much too often and much too strongly to be even halfway satisfied. And I need feel this bedrock only for an uninterrupted quarter hour before the poisonous world flies into my mouth, like water into that of a drowning man.
At the moment there is scarcely any difference between me and the bachelor, only that I still think about my youth in the village and perhaps, whenever I want it perhaps, even if only my position demands it, I can throw myself back there. But the bachelor has nothing before him, and so nothing behind him. At the moment there is no difference, but the bachelor has only the moment. At that time which nobody today can know, since nothing could be so annihilated as that time, at that time he lost himself in continually feeling his bedrock, just as one suddenly notices a sore on one’s body that until then had been the least thing on one’s form—yes not even the least, since it seemed not to exist then—and now is more than every bodily thing we have possessed since our birth. If until then we had focused with our entire person on the work of our hands, the sight in our eyes, the sound in our ears, the steps of our feet, now we suddenly turn in the exact opposite direction, like a weathervane in the mountains. Now at that time, instead of running away even in this last direction, since only running away could keep him on tiptoe and only the tips of his toes could secure him in the world, instead of that he laid himself down, as children in winter lie down here and there in the snow, to freeze to death.
He and these children, they know of course that their lying down or otherwise giving up is their own fault, they know that they shouldn’t have done so for anything in the world, but they cannot know that after the change that is now coming over them, in the fields or in the city, they will forget every earlier fault, every obligation, and will move in this new element as if it were their first.
I’m not falling asleep, he answered, and blinked as he shook his head. If I fell asleep, how could I watch over you? And don’t I have to do that? Isn’t that why you grabbed hold of me back then, in front of the church? Of course that’s already a long time ago, we know that, just keep your watch in your pocket.
So it’s already much too late, I said. I had to smile a little, and in order to conceal it I looked intently into the house.
Are you really so pleased with that? So you’d like to go up, really like to? Then just say so, it’s not like I’ll bite you. Look, if you think that it will go better for you upstairs than down here, then simply go up, right now, without thinking of me. It’s my opinion, and so the opinion of any random bunch of passers-by, that soon you’ll come back down here, and that it would be very good then if somehow there could be someone standing here, someone whose face you would absolutely not look at, but who could take you by the arm to some nearby tavern, strengthen you with wine, and then take you to his room which, miserable as it is, still has a pair of windowpanes between it and the night—you can blow off this opinion for now. It’s true, I can repeat it before anyone you like, that down here it goes badly for us, yes, even that we’re miserable as dogs, but there’s no help for me now whether I lie here in the gutter to dam the rainwater or drink champagne up there with the same lips, it doesn’t make any difference. Anyhow, I don’t have the least choice between these two things, nothing ever happens to me that would attract people’s attention, how could it possibly happen under the structure of these ceremonies that I need, all I can do is crawl onward beneath them, no better than the bugs. Still, you know everything you’ve got inside you, you have courage, at least you think you have it; all right then, try as much as you dare, often you might already recognize yourself—if you pay attention—in the face of the servant by the door.
If I only knew for sure that you were being straight with me, I would have gone up long ago. But how could I even figure out if you’re being straight with me. Now you look at me as if I were a small child, that doesn’t help me, that just makes it worse. But perhaps you want to make it worse. Besides, I can no longer bear the air in the street, so I already belong in the society up there, if I take careful notice my throat scrapes, there you have it, I cough, do you have any idea how it will go for me up there? The foot with which I step into the hall will already be transformed before I can pull the other after it.
You’re right, I am not being straight with you
But forgetting is not the right word here. The memory of this man has suffered no more than his power of imagination. But they simply cannot move mountains; the man stands once and for all outside our people, outside our humanity, constantly starved, nothing belongs to him but the moment, the ever-continuing unbearable moment without even a sliver of a moment of recovery to follow it, he forever has only one thing: his pains, no second thing in the entire circumference of the world that could act as medicine, he has only the ground required by his two feet, only the purchase covered by his two hands, thus even less than trapeze artists in a vaudeville show, who at least have a safety net suspended beneath them. We others, we are held firm by our past and future, we spend almost all of our leisure time and so much of our work to keep them swaying back and forth in equilibrium. What the future has in forward scope the past makes up for in weight, and at their close the two are really no longer to be differentiated; earliest youth in time becomes as bright as the future, and the end of the future is actually, with all of our sighs, already gone into the past. So this circle along whose edge we travel nearly closes itself. This circle certainly does belong to us, but it belongs to us only so long as we hold onto it, if we shift even once to the side in some sort of absent-mindedness, distraction, terror, surprise, exhaustion, we have already lost it in space, until then our noses were stuck into the current of time, now we step back; once swimmers, now walkers, we are lost. We are outside the law, no one knows it and yet everyone treats us accordingly.
6 September 1910 Which I get over easily in any case, for I’m allowed neither one nor the other, and therefore it isn’t right for me to compare myself to you. Now you! How long have you actually been in the city how long have you been in the city I ask.
Five months. But I already know them well enough. You, I have given myself no rest. When I look back like this I don’t even know if there were any nights, it all appears to me, can you imagine it, as a single day, and there was no time of day there, not even differences in light
6 September 1910
One Madame Chenu’s conference on Musset. Jewish women’s habit of smacking their lips, understand the French through all the preparations and difficulties of the anecdote until just before the conclusion, which ought to live on in the heart upon the ruins of the whole anecdote, the French snuffs out before our eyes, perhaps we were concentrating too hard until then, the people who understand French leave before the end, as they have already heard enough, the others have heard nothing near enough, the hall’s acoustics which favor the coughs in the boxes more than the lecturer’s words, late meal at Rachel’s, she reads Racine: Phaedra with Musset, the book lies between them on the table where every possible thing is lying. Consul Claudel, a sparkle in his eyes which his broad face holds and shines against, he constantly wants to say goodbye, he even manages it individually, but not in general, for whenever he says goodbye to one person, there is someone new who joins the person he has just said goodbye to. Above the speaker’s stage is a gallery for the orchestra. Every possible noise interrupts. Waiters from the corridor, guests in their rooms, a piano, a distant string orchestra, a hammering, finally an argument that is hugely irritating because its location is so difficult to fix. In one box a lady with diamonds in her earrings, whose light shifts almost without pause. At the ticket office young people dressed in black from a French Circle. One says hello with an abrupt bend that forces his eyes down to the ground. At the same time he smiles abruptly. But he does this only before young ladies, immediately afterward he looks the men straight in the face with a serious set to his mouth, thus simultaneously pronouncing the previous greeting to be a perhaps laughable, but in any case unavoidable ceremony.
7 September 1910
Lecture by Wiegler on Hebbel. Sits onstage amid the set of a modern room, as if his beloved were going to jump in through a door to finally start the piece. No, he lectures. Hebbel’s hunger. Complicated relationship with Elisa Lensing. In school he has an old maid for a teacher who smokes, takes snuff, beats the children and gives raisins to the good ones. He travels all around [Heidelberg, Munich, Paris] without much of a visible goal. Is a servant at first to the parish administrator, sleeps in a bed with the coachman under the stairs.
Perhaps it seems to you now as if I wanted to complain about it? But no, why complain about it, I’m allowed neither one nor the other. I just have to take my walks, and that has to be enough, for at least there is not a place in the world where I couldn’t take my walks. But now it looks again like I’m conceited about it
I have it easy, then. I shouldn’t have stayed here in front of the house.
So don’t compare yourself to me in this, and don’t let me make you insecure. After all you’re a grown man, and besides, it looks like you’re pretty abandoned here in the city
Then you don’t even sense in your heart that you can’t compare yourself to me in these things. I can’t conceive it. Now how long have you already been here in the city?
“Five months,” I said, so cautiously that I kept my mouth open afterwards. Yes, five months. That was right. I left the door
After all you sense it already, if you look carefully, in your
You just can’t compare yourself to me in this. But do I have to tell you that, after all you sense it already if you look carefully in your heart. How long now have you actually been in the city.
Five months I said so cautiously that I kept my mouth open afterwards.
You just can’t compare yourself to me in this. But that I have to tell you that first! Don’t you sense it already, if you look carefully, in your heart? How long now have you actually been in the city?
And these mornings, looking out the window, pulling the chair away from the bed and sitting down for coffee. And these evenings propped on one’s arm and holding one’s ear in hand. Yes, if only that weren’t all of it! If only one could at least take on a few new habits, like those to be seen every day here in the streets
Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, a drawing by Friedrich Olivier, he is sketching on a slope how beautiful and serious he is there (a high hat like a smoothed-down clown’s cap with a narrow brim falling stiff over his face, long wavy hair, eyes only for his picture, calm hands, the board on his knees, one foot has slipped a little lower on the embankment.)
but no, that is Friedrich Olivier drawn by Schnorr
So you mustn’t think about me now. How can you want to compare yourself to me as well. I’ve already been here in the city for more than twenty years. Can you truly imagine just what that is. I have passed each season here twenty times -
Now he shook his loose fist over our heads.
The trees here have grown upwards for twenty years, one should come to be so small under them. And these many nights, you know, in all the apartments. Now you lie at this wall, now at that wall, so that the window shifts around you. And these mornings,
I am quite close to it. Those things that protected me seemed already dissolved here in the city, in the first days I was beautiful, since this dissolution appears as an apotheosis where all that holds us to life flies away, but in flying away still shines its human light on us for the last time. So I stand before my bachelor, and most likely he loves me for it without understanding why. Now and then his talk seems to show that he has figured it out, that he knows who he has before him and that he therefore can afford to do anything. But no, it isn’t so. Instead he would meet everyone in this way, for he can live only as a hermit or a parasite. He is a hermit only under duress, and should the duress be overcome—as in this case—through powers unknown to him, he is still a parasite who continues as offensively as he can. In any case nothing in the world can rescue him now, so that his behavior might suggest a drunkard’s corpse, driven by some surface current, that pushes against a tired swimmer, lays hands on him and tries to hold him fast. The corpse does not come to life, no it is not even recovered, but it can pull the man under
So you mustn’t think about me now. In a strange city it’s nice, I know, to identify yourself once and for all with a man you take to be experienced
So you mustn’t think about me now.
10 o’clock, 15 November 1910. I will not let myself grow tired. I will jump into my story even if it slices me in the face.
16 November 1910, 12 o’ clock. I am reading Iphigenia at Tauris. Apart from certain obviously flawed points, the dried-up German language in the mouth of a pure boy is truly amazing. Each word before the reader, in the moment of reading, is carried to its peak by the verse and stands there in light: perhaps scant, but it seeps through.
27 (November 1910) Bernhard Kellermann read aloud: some unpublished things from my pen, he began by saying. He seems a nice man, his hair almost gray, shaved smooth with care, pointed nose, the flesh of his cheeks tends to run back and forth like a wave over his cheekbones. He is a mediocre author with good passages (a man goes out into the corridor, coughs and looks around to see if anyone is there) also an honest man who wants to read what he has promised, but the public didn’t let him; from horror at his first story about a nervous sanatorium and from boredom at his way of reading aloud, people kept leaving one by one, in spite of the story’s poor suspense, as enthusiastically as if there were a reading next door. When, after a third of the story, he drank a little mineral water, a whole group of people got up and left. He took fright. It’s nearly finished, he lied baldly. When he had finished everyone stood up, there was some applause that sounded as if someone had remained sitting among all the standing people and was clapping by himself. But now Kellermann wanted to go on reading another story, perhaps even more. At the mass departure he could only open his mouth. Finally, after taking some advice, he said: I would still like to read a little fairy tale, only fifteen minutes long. I’ll take a five-minute break. A few still remained, to whom he read a fairy tale with passages that would have justified anyone, even at the farthest point of the hall, in running through the entire audience to get outside.
Rudle 1 K
guilty
Kars 20 h
You, I said, and gave him a small push with my knee (at this sudden speech a bit of saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen) don’t fall asleep
“I’m not falling asleep” he said quickly, and blinked as he shook his head. If I fell asleep, how could I watch over you? And don’t I have to do that. Isn’t that why you grabbed hold of me back then, in front of the church. Of course that’s already a long time ago, we know that, just keep your watch in your pocket.
So it’s already much too late, I said, and shrugged my shoulders, as both an excuse for my impatience and a reproach to him for having delayed me so long.
“You” I said, and gave him a small push with my knee (at this sudden speech a bit of saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen).
15 December 1910. I simply don’t believe my conclusions on my present condition, which has already lasted almost a year now, my condition is too serious for that. I don’t even know if I can say that it is not a new condition. Still my true opinion is: this condition is new, I have had similar, but never before one like this. It’s just as if I am made of stone, as if I am my own gravestone, with no space for doubt or for belief, for love or loathing, for courage or fear in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on gravestones. Almost no word that I write fits any other, I hear how the tinny consonants rub against one another and the vowels sing along like Negroes at an exhibition. My doubts stand in a circle around each word, I see them before the word, but what then! I don’t see the word at all, I invent it. Still that wouldn’t be the greatest unhappiness, only I should be able to invent words capable of blowing the corpse’s smell in a direction that would not hit me and the reader right in the face. When I sit down at the writing desk I’m no better off than someone who falls and breaks both legs in the middle of traffic on the Place de L’Opera. All the carriages move along, despite their noise, silently from all directions in all directions, but that man’s pain keeps better order than the traffic police, it closes his eyes and clears the plaza and streets without the carriages having to turn around. The great bustle pains him, for he is quite an obstacle to traffic, but the emptiness is no less terrible, for it lets loose his real pain.
16 December 1910. I will not abandon the diary any longer. I must hold onto myself here, it is only here that I can.
I would better like to explain the feeling of happiness that at certain times, such as just now, I have within me. It is really something sparkling, it fills me to the brim with its light, pleasant flickering and persuades me of those capabilities whose nonexistence I can convince myself of at any moment, even now.
Hebbel praises Justinus Kerner’s “Shadows of Travel”
“And such a work scarcely exists, no one knows it”
The Street of Loneliness by W. Fred. How do such books get written? A man capable of managing small pieces here stretches out his talent over the length of a novel in such a pitiful way that it makes one sick, even if one doesn’t forget to admire the energy in mistreating one’s own talents.
This pursuit of unimportant people whom I read about in novels, plays, etc. This feeling of solidarity that I have then! In the “Old Maids of Bischofsberg” (is it called that?) it is said of two seamstresses that they are preparing the white things for the one bride in the play. How are things with these two girls? Where do they live? What have they done that they may not come into the play, but instead literally drown out in front of Noah’s ark beneath the torrents of rain, at last only their faces might press against a cabin window so that for a moment the audience in the stalls sees something dark there.
17 December 1910. Zeno replied to a pressing question, whether anything is at rest: Yes the flying arrow is at rest
If the French were only German in their essence, how greatly they would be admired by the Germans.
That I have put aside and crossed out so much, in fact almost the whole of what I wrote this year, this too badly blocks me from writing. Yes, it is a mountain, it is five times as much as everything I have ever written, and by its mass alone it pulls everything I write away from under my pen, back toward itself
18 December 1910. If it were not certain that my reason for leaving letters unopened for days (even those with presumably unimportant contents, such as this one now) is mere weakness and cowardice, which hesitate to open a letter as much as they would hesitate to open the door of a room in which a man was waiting for me, possibly with great impatience, then this laying aside of letters could be explained much better as thoroughness. That is, assuming that I am a thorough person, I must try to prolong everything that possibly concerns the letter, thus to open it very slowly, read it slowly and repeatedly, consider it long, prepare a fair copy with many drafts and finally hesistate with the reply. All this lies in my power, it is only the sudden receiving of letters that cannot be avoided. Now I slow down even this in an artificial way, for a long time I do not open it, it lies before me at the door, it continually offers itself to me, I continually receive it, but I do not take it.
Spirit of beauty
11:30 p.m. That so long as I am not liberated from my office, I am simply lost, that above all is clear to me; it’s only a question, so long as it’s possible, of holding my head high enough to keep from drowning. How difficult this will be, what powers it must sap from me, is already apparent in that I did not keep my new schedule today of sitting at the writing table from 8 to 11 in the evening, that even now I don’t consider this so great a disaster, that I have only hastily written down these few lines in order to go to bed.
19 December 1910. Started to work at the office. Afternoon at Max’s.
Read a bit of Goethe’s diaries. Distance already holds his life firmly in peace, these diaries set fire to it. The clarity of all the events makes them mysterious, just as a park railing gives the eyes rest from viewing the expanse of farther lawns and yet causes us no corresponding admiration.
Just now my married sister is coming to visit us for the first time.
20 December 1910. With what can I excuse yesterday’s remark about Goethe (which is almost as untrue as the feeling it describes, since the real one was driven away by my sister)? With nothing. With what can I excuse my not yet having written anything today? With nothing. Seeing as my state of mind is not the worst. I have a continual call in my ear: “If you came, invisible judgment!”
So that these false points which don’t want to leave the story at any price will finally give me peace, I write two here:
“His breaths were loud, like sighs in a dream in which misfortune is easier to bear than in our world, so that simple breaths alone suffice for sighs.”
“Now I looked over him as carelessly as one looks over a small game of skill, about which one says to oneself: “What does it matter that I can’t get the little balls into their holes, everything is still mine, the glass, the frame, the little balls and whatever else is there; I can simply put this whole trick into my pocket.”
21 December 1910. Strange things from “The Deeds of Alexander the Great” by Michail Kusmin:
“Child whose upper half dead, the lower alive,” “Child’s body with little red legs moving”
“The unholy kings Gog and Magog, who nourished themselves on worms and flies, he banished into broken cliffs and sealed in until the end of the world with the seal of Solomon”
“Rivers of stone, where in place of water stones rolled with a deafening noise, along the streams of sand that flowed for three days to the south and for three days to the north”
Amazons, women with their right breasts burned off, short hair, men’s footgear
Crocodiles that burned up trees with their urine
Was at Baum’s, so heard fine things. I, invalid as before and always. To have the feeling of being bound and at the same time the other, that to be unbound would be even worse.
22 December 1910. Today I do not even dare to reproach myself. To call out into this empty day would have a disgusting echo.
24 December 1910. I have now taken a closer look over my writing desk and have seen that nothing good can be done with it. So much is lying around, it forms a disorder without symmetry and without any of the hospitality of disordered things that otherwise makes any disorder bearable. Let disorder spread as it likes over the green cloth, that was permitted even in the stalls of old theatres. But that in the standing room
25 December 1910. up out of the open compartment under the top part of the desk come leaflets, old newspapers, catalogs, picture postcards, letters, all ripped into pieces, opened into pieces in the shape of an uncovered flight of stairs, this disgraceful state of affairs spoils everything. Individual, fairly enormous things from the stands crop up in the greatest possible activity, as if in a theater shopkeepers were allowed to balance their account books in the orchestra, the carpenter allowed to hammer, the officer to swing around his saber, the clergyman to address the heart, the scholar to address the understanding, the politician to address the civic sense, for lovers not to restrain themselves, etc. On my writing desk only the shaving mirror stands upright, as is needed for shaving, the clothes brush lies with its brushing surface on the cloth, the coin purse lies open in case I want to count it, a key protrudes from the bunch, ready for work, and a tie loops itself in portions around my undone shirt collar. The next higher compartment of the top part, already crammed by the the closed small paper drawers, is nothing but a junk room, so as if the lower balcony of the stands, really the most visible part of the theater, were reserved for the commonest people, for old men-about-town whose filth gradually comes out from within, coarse fellows who let their feet hang over the balcony railing, here families with so many children that one can only glance over them quickly, without being able to count them, set up the filth of poor nurseries (in fact it’s already spilling into the orchestra) the incurably ill sit in the dark background, fortunately one sees them only if one shines a light back there, etc. In this drawer lie old papers that I would long ago have thrown away if I had a wastebasket, pencils with broken points, an empty matchbox, a paperweight from Karlsbad, a ruler whose edge would be too bumpy for a country road, old collar studs, blunt razor blades (for which there is no place in the world), pince-nezes and a still heavier paperweight of iron. In the drawer above -
Miserable, miserable and yet well intended. Yes, it is midnight, but since I am quite rested, that is an excuse only in that I would have written absolutely nothing during the day. The lighted electric lamp, the quiet room, the darkness outside, the last moment of waking, they give me the right to write even if that is the most miserable. And this right I use hurriedly. That’s how I am.
26 December 1910. For two and a half days I was—though not completely—alone, and already I am, if not quite transformed, certainly on the way. Solitude has a power over me that never fails. My interior loosens (only superficially for now) and is ready to release what lies deeper. A small ordering of my interior begins to establish itself and I need nothing more, for disorder in small talents is the worst.
27 December 1910. My strength won’t last another sentence. Yes, if it were a matter of words, if it were enough to set down a word and one could turn away with the calm consciousness of having entirely filled this word with oneself.
I slept away part of the afternoon, while awake lay on the sofa, thought over a particular love experience from my youth, lingered with irritation over a missed opportunity (once I lay in bed with a slight cold and my governess read me the “Kreutzer Sonata,” which allowed her to enjoy my agitation), imagined my vegetarian supper, was pleased with my digestion and worried whether my eyesight would last through my whole life.
28 December 1910. When I have behaved like a human being for a few hours, as today with Max and later at Baum’s, I am so conceited before going to sleep
