lost. I asked him whether he was tired. He was not tired, why did I ask? I am tired, I replied, and sat down.
To lift yourself out of such a mood, even if you have to do it by strength of will, should be easy. I force myself out of my chair, circle the table in long strides, exercise
my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them. Defy my own feelings, welcome Löwy enthusiastically supposing he comes to see me,
amiably tolerate my sister in the room while I write, swallow all that is said at Max’s, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts. Yet even if I managed
fairly well in some of this, one obvious slip, and slips cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, the easy and the difficult alike, and I will have to turn backwards in
the circle. So the best resource is to meet everything as calmly as possible, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are carried away, not to let yourself
be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, to yield to the non-conscious that you believe far
away while it is precisely what is burning you, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the
graveyard and let nothing survive save that. A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows.
Short spell of faintness yesterday in the Café City with Löwy. How I bent down over a newspaper to hide it.
Goethe’s beautiful silhouette. Simultaneous impression of repugnance when looking at this perfect human body, since to surpass this degree of perfection is unimaginable
and yet it looks only as though it had been put together by accident. The erect posture, the dangling arms, the slender throat, the bend in the knees.
My impatience and grief because of my exhaustion are nourished especially on the prospect of the future that is thus prepared for me and which is never out of my
sight. What evenings, walks, despair in bed and on the sofa (7 February) are still before me, worse than those I have already endured!
Yesterday in the factory. The girls, in their unbearably dirty and untidy clothes, their hair disheveled as though they had just got up, the expressions on their faces fixed
by the incessant noise of the transmission belts and by the individual machines, automatic ones, of course, but unpredictably breaking down, they aren’t people, you don’t
greet them, you don’t apologize when you bump into them, if you call them over to do something, they do it but return to their machine at once, with a nod of the head
you show them what to do, they stand there in petticoats, they are at the mercy of the pettiest power and haven’t enough calm understanding to recognize this power and
placate it by a glance, a bow. But when six o’clock comes and they call it out to one another, when they untie the kerchiefs from around their throats and their hair, dust
themselves with a brush that passes around and is constantly called for by the impatient, when they pull their skirts on over their heads and clean their hands as well as
they can—then at last they are women again, despite pallor and bad teeth they can smile, shake their stiff bodies, you can no longer bump into them, stare at them, or
overlook them, you move back against the greasy crates to make room for them, hold your hat in your hand when they say good evening, and do not know how to
behave when one of them holds your winter coat for you to put on.
8 February. Goethe: “My delight in creating was infinite.”
I have become more nervous, weaker, and have lost a large part of the calm on which I prided myself years ago. Today, when I received the card from Baum in which
he writes that he cannot give the talk at the evening for the Eastern Jews after all, and when I was therefore compelled to think that I should have to take it over, I was