Instead of which I went for a walk, erased all the emotion I had absorbed in a conversation with Haas, whom I had run into, women excited me, I am now reading “The
Metamorphosis” at home and find it bad. Perhaps I am really lost, the sadness of this morning will return again, I shall not be able to resist it for long, it deprives me of
all hope. I don’t even have the desire to keep a diary, perhaps because there is already too much lacking in it, perhaps because I should perpetually have to describe
incomplete—by all appearances necessarily incomplete—actions, perhaps because writing itself adds to my sadness.
I would gladly write fairy tales (why do I hate the word so?) that could please W. [Gerti Wasner, the girl he met in Riva] and that she might sometimes keep under
the table at meals, read between courses, and blush fearfully when she noticed that the sanatorium doctor has been standing behind her for a little while now and
watching her. Her excitement sometimes—or really all of the time—when she hears stories.
I notice that I am afraid of the almost physical strain of the effort to remember, afraid of the pain beneath which the floor of the thoughtless vacuum of the mind slowly
opens up, or even merely heaves up a little in preparation. All things resist being written down. If I knew that her commandment not to mention her were at work here
(I have kept it faithfully, almost without effort), then I should be satisfied, but it is nothing but inability. Besides, what am I to think of the fact that this evening, for a long
while, I was pondering what the acquaintance with W. had cost me in pleasures with the Russian woman, who at night perhaps (this is by no means impossible) might
have let me into her room, which was diagonally across from mine. While my evening’s intercourse with W. was carried on in a language of knocks whose meaning we
never definitely agreed upon. I knocked on the ceiling of my room below hers, received her answer, leaned out of the window, greeted her, once let myself be blessed
by her, once snatched at a ribbon she let down, sat on the window sill for hours, heard every one of her steps above, mistakenly regarded every chance knock to be the
sign of an understanding, heard her coughing, her singing before she fell asleep.
21 October. Lost day. Visit to the Ringhoffer factory, Ehrenfels’s seminar, at Weltsch’s, dinner, walk, now here at ten o’clock. I keep thinking of the black beetle, but
will not write.
In the small harbor of a fishing village a barque was being fitted out for a voyage. A young man in wide sailor-trousers was supervising the work. Two old sailors were
carrying sacks and chests to a gangplank where a tall man, his legs spread wide, took everything and handed it over into hands that stretched towards him from the dark
interior of the barque. On the large, square-hewn stones enclosing a corner of the dock, half-reclining, sat five men, they blew the smoke of their pipes in all directions.
From time to time the man in the wide sailor-trousers went up to them, made a little speech, and slapped them on the knees. Usually a wine jug was brought out from
behind a stone in whose shade it was kept, and a glass of opaque red wine passed from man to man.
22 October. Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in the boat. That was most beautiful of all. Always only the desire to die and the
not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.
Yesterday’s observation. The most appropriate situation for me: To listen to a conversation between two people who are discussing a matter that concerns them closely
while I have only a very remote interest in it which is in addition completely selfless.
26 October. The family sat at dinner. Through the uncurtained windows one could look out into the tropic night.
“Who am I, then?” I rebuked myself. I got up from the sofa upon which I had been lying with my knees drawn up, and sat erect. The door, which led straight from the