sisters, my vanity, which this time has no justification, still shows itself: I feel offended if anyone finds fault with my reading, I become flushed and want to read on
quickly, just as I usually strive, once I have begun, to read on endlessly, out of an unconscious yearning that during the course of the long reading there may be produced,
at least in me, that vain, false feeling of integration with what I read which makes me forget that I shall never be strong enough at any one moment to impose my
feelings on the clear vision of the listener and that at home it is always my sisters who initiate this longed-for substitution.
5 January. For two days I have noticed, whenever I choose to, an inner coolness and indifference. Yesterday evening, during my walk, every little street sound, every
eye turned towards me, every picture in a showcase, was more important to me than myself.
Uniformity. History.
When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on
the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and
when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion not only paternal anger but surprise to everyone, when besides, the
stairs are in darkness and the front door locked and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself
for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door more or less hastily according to the
degree of displeasure you think you have left behind you and so cut off the general discussion of your departure, and when you find yourself once more in the street with
limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel aroused within yourself all
the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the
swiftest of changes, that left alone you grow in understanding and calm, and in the enjoyment of them—then for that evening you have so completely got away from
your family that the most distant journey could not take you farther and you have lived through what is for Europe so extreme an experience of solitude that one can only
call it Russian. All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.
Invited Weltsch to come to Mrs. Klug’s benefit. Löwy, with his severe headaches that probably indicate a serious head ailment, leaned against a wall down in the street
where he was waiting for me, his right hand pressed in despair against his forehead. I pointed him out to Weltsch who, from his sofa, leaned out of the window. I
thought it was the first time in my life that I had so easily observed from the window an incident down in the street that concerned me so closely. In and of itself, this
kind of observation is familiar to me from Sherlock Holmes.
6 January. Yesterday Vizekönig [Vice-King] by Feimann. My receptivity to the Jewishness in these plays deserts me because they are too monotonous and
degenerate into a wailing that prides itself on isolated, violent outbreaks. When I saw the first plays it was possible for me to think that I had come upon a Judaism on
which the beginnings of my own rested, a Judaism that was developing in my direction and so would enlighten and carry me farther along in my own clumsy Judaism,
instead, it moves farther away from me the more I hear of it. The people remain, of course, and I hold fast to them.