1911.01
3 January 1911
“You,” I said, and then gave him a small push with my knee. “I want to say goodbye.” At this sudden speech a bit of saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen.
“But you’ve been thinking over that for a while,” he said stepped away from the wall and stretched himself.
No. I wasn’t thinking it over at all.
Then what were you thinking about?
I was preparing myself further for society, for the last time. Try as hard as you can, you won’t understand it. I, no one in particular from the country, who could be exchanged at any moment for one of those who stand together in the hundreds at the station, waiting for specific trains
4 January 1911. “Belief and Homeland” by Schönherr.
Beneath me the wet fingers of the gallery visitors wiping their eyes.
6 January 1911
“You,” I said, took aim and gave him a small push with my knee, I’m going off now. If you want to watch, open your eyes
Is that so? he asked, while from completely open eyes he gave me a direct look that was nevertheless so weak that I could have fended it off with a wave of my arms. So you’re going, then. What am I supposed to do? I can’t stop you. And if I could, I wouldn’t want to. This is only to enlighten you about the feeling you have that you could be held back by me. And immediately he put on the face which lowly domestic servants are permitted to use, in an otherwise regulated nation, to make the masters’ children obedient or timid.
7 January 1911. Max’s sister, who is so in love with her fiancé that she tries to arrange to speak with every visitor individually, since individually one can better express and repeat one’s love
7 January 1911. As if by magic, since neither outer nor inner circumstances held me back—they are more favorable now than they have been in a year—for the entire holiday (it’s a Sunday) I was prevented from writing. — Several new realizations about the unhappy being I am have come to me as consolation.
You I said, took aim and gave him a small push with my knee, open your eyes, I want to say goodbye. At this sudden speech a bit of saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen.
Is that so, he said and looked at me with a gaze that ran several times over my face but seemed to hit me only by chance, for I could have fended it off with a wave of my arm.
12 January 1911. I have not written much about myself recently, in part from laziness (I am sleeping so much and so soundly during the day, during sleep I have a greater weight) but also in part from fear of betraying my self-knowledge. This fear is justified, since self-knowledge may be set down conclusively in writing only if it can be done with the greatest completeness, down to all of its unimportant consequences, and with total truthfulness as well. For if this does not happen—and in any case I am not capable of it—then the writing replaces what is indistinctly felt, after its own intention and with the superior strength of what is set down, in such a way that the true feeling fades away while the worthlessness of making notes is realized too late.
A few days ago Leonie Frippon, cabaret singer, Vienna City. Hairstyle tied around in heaps of curls. Bad bodice, very old dress (knight’s lady), but very pretty with tragic movements, straining the eyelids, felling the long legs, well understood stretching of the arms along the body, meaning of the stiff neck at ambiguous points. Sang: Button Collection in the Louvre.
Schiller sketched by Schadow 1804 in Berlin, where he was greatly honored. One cannot grasp a face more firmly than by this nose. The septum is slightly pulled down from the habit of tugging at the nose while at work. A friendly, somewhat hollow-cheeked person, probably made senile by his shaved face.
14 January 1911
Novel, “Married People,” by Beradt. A lot of bad Jewishness. A sudden monotonous coy appearance of the author, for instance, everyone was merry, but one was there who was not merry, or there comes one Herr Stern (whom we already know down to his novelistic bones). There is something similar in Hamsun also, but there it is as natural as the knots in wood, here instead it drips into the plot like a fashionable medicine over sugar. - It gets stuck without reason at strange turns, such as, he was painstaking over her hair, painstaking and again painstaking. - Individual people are, without being brought into a new light, well brought out, so well that even occasional errors do no harm. Minor characters mostly hopeless.
17 January 1911. Max read me the first act of “Farewell to Youth.” How can I get hold of this, the way I am today; I would have to search for a year before finding a true feeling in myself and I am supposed to be somehow justified in the face of so great a work—in a coffee house late in the evening, tormented by the coursing winds of a digestion that is bad despite everything—in remaining seated in my chair.
19 January 1911
I will, since I seem to be finished through and through - in the last year I have not been awake for more than five minutes at a time - every day either have to wish myself off the earth or else, without being permitted to see the mildest hope in it, start all over as a small child. By doing this I will superficially have it easier than before. For in those days I aspired, with hardly the faintest foreboding, toward a description that would be bound word by word to my life, that I would draw to my breast and that would lift me in rapture from my place. With what despair (though of course incomparable with the present) I began! What a chill pursued me throughout the day from what I had written! The threat was so great and its force was so seldom interrupted that I did not feel that chill in the least, which admittedly did not much lessen my overall unhappiness.
Once I planned a novel in which two brothers would fight each other, after which one would travel to America while the other remained in a European prison. I began to write lines only here and there, since it wore me out immediately. So once on a Sunday afternoon, while we were visiting our grandparents and had eaten there the usual especially soft bread spread with butter, I wrote down something about my prison. It is very likely that I did it mostly out of vanity, and that by shuffling the papers over the tablecloth, tapping with my pen, looking around the group under the lamp, I wanted to tempt someone to take the writing from me, look at it and admire me. It was mainly the hall of the prison that was described in these few lines, above all its stillness and coldness; a sympathetic word was also said about the brother who stayed behind, since he was the good brother. Perhaps I had a mometary feeling of the worthlessness of my description, but before that afternoon, I never took much notice of such feelings when I sat among the relatives to whom I was accustomed (my timidity was so great that this familiarity in itself made me half happy) at the round table in the well-known room, and could not forget that I was young and called to greatness from this present calm. An uncle who liked to laugh at people finally took the page that I was holding only weakly, briefly looked over it, handed it back to me without even laughing and only said to the others who were following him with their eyes, “The usual stuff,” to me he said nothing. Certainly I remained sitting, and I bent as before over my now useless page, but in fact with one shove I had been expelled from society, my uncle’s judgment repeated itself inside me with almost a real significance and even within the feeling of family I received an insight into the cold space of our world, which I had to warm with some fire that I would first seek out
