body. I looked at her much less often than I wanted to.
24 March. Sunday, yesterday. Die Sternenbraut [The Star Bride] by Christian von Ehrenfels—Lost in watching. The sick officer in the play. The sick body in the
tight uniform that made health and decisiveness a duty.
In the morning in the bright sun at Max’s for half an hour.
In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is
no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without
any sense of responsibility. But for the very reason that such conversations are unthinkable without absent-mindedness, they reveal empty spaces which, if one insists,
can be filled only by thinking, or, better yet, by dreams.
25 March. The broom sweeping the rug in the next room sounds like the train of a dress moving in jerks.
26 March. Only not to overestimate what I have written, for in that way I make what is to be written unattainable.
27 March. Monday, on the street. The boy who, with several others, threw a large ball at a servant girl walking defenselessly in front of them; just as the ball was
flying at the girl’s behind I grabbed him by the throat, choked him in fury, thrust him aside, and swore. Then walked on and didn’t even look at the girl. One quite forgets
one’s earthly existence because one is so entirely full of fury and is permitted to believe that, given the opportunity, one would in the same way fill oneself with even
more beautiful emotions.
28 March. From Mrs. Fanta’s lecture, “Impressions of Berlin”: Grillparzer once didn’t want to go to a party because he knew that Hebbel, with whom he was friendly,
would also be there. “He will question me again about my opinion on God, and when I don’t know what to say, he will become rude”—My awkward behavior.
29 March. Delighted with the bathroom. Gradual understanding. The afternoons I spent on my hair.
1 April. For the first time in a week an almost complete failure in writing. Why? Last week too I lived through various moods and kept their influence away from my
writing; but I am afraid to write about it.
3 April. This is how a day passes—in the morning, the office, in the afternoon, the factory, now in the evening, shouting to the right and left of me at home, later brought
my sister home from Hamlet—and I haven’t been able to make use of a single moment.
8 April. Saturday before Easter. Complete knowledge of oneself. To be able to seize the whole of one’s abilities like a little ball. To accept the greatest decline as
something familiar and so still remain elastic in it.
Desire for a deeper sleep that dissolves more. The metaphysical urge is only the urge toward death.
How affectedly I spoke today in Haas’s presence because he praised Max’s and my travel report, so that in this way, at least, I might make myself worthy of the praise
that the report does not warrant, or so that I might continue by fraud the fraudulent or lying effect of the travel report, or in the spirit of Haas’s amiable lie, which I tried
to make easier for him.
6 May. 11 o’clock. For the first time in a considerable while a complete failure in writing. The feeling of a tried man.
Dreamed recently:
I was riding with my father through Berlin in a tram car. The big-city quality was represented by countless striped toll bars standing upright, finished off bluntly at the
ends. Apart from that everything was almost empty, but there was a great forest of these toll bars. We came to a gate, got out without any sense of getting out,
stepped through the gate. On the other side of the gate a sheer wall rose up, which my father ascended almost in a dance, his legs flew out as he climbed, so easy was