into the gap through which I had come. Then he fell towards me, I was as large as a giant now and yet had an awkward hold on him, besides, the vehicle, as though out
of control, began to move backwards, even if slowly, and pulled me after it. We went past an open van on which a number of people were standing crowded together,
all dressed in dark clothes, among them a Boy Scout wearing a light-gray hat with the brim turned up. I expected this boy, whom I had already recognized at some
distance, to help me, but he turned away and squeezed himself in among the people. Then, behind this open van—the tricycle kept rolling on and I, bent low, with legs
astraddle, had to follow—there came towards me someone who brought me help, but whom I cannot remember. I only know that he was a trustworthy person who is
now concealing himself as though behind a black cloth curtain and whose concealment I should respect.
18 November. I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been
compelled—without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion—to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is
offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.
Two dogs in a yard into which the sun shone hotly ran towards each other from opposite directions.
Worried and slaved over the beginning of a letter to Miss Bl.
19 November. The reading of the diary moves me. Is it because I no longer have the slightest confidence now? Everything appears to me to be an artificial
construction of the mind. Every mark by someone else, every chance look throws everything in me over on the other side, even what has been forgotten, even what is
entirely insignificant. I am more uncertain than I ever was, I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty. I am really like a lost sheep in the night and in the
mountains, or like a sheep which is running after this sheep. To be so lost and not have the strength to regret it.
I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores. Walking past them excites me, the remote but nevertheless existent possibility of going with one. Is that
grossness? But I know no better, and doing this seems basically innocent to me and causes me almost no regret. I want only the stout, older ones, with outmoded
clothes that have, however, a certain luxuriousness because of various adornments. One woman probably knows me by now. I met her this afternoon, she was not yet
in her working clothes, her hair was still flat against her head, she was wearing no hat, a work blouse like a cook’s, and was carrying a bundle of some sort, perhaps to
the laundress. No one would have found anything exciting in her, only me. We looked at each other fleetingly. Now, in the evening, it had meanwhile grown cold, I
saw her, wearing a tight-fitting, yellowish-brown coat, on the other side of the narrow street that branches off from Zeltnerstrasse, where she has her beat. I looked
back at her twice, she caught the glance too, but then I really ran away from her.
This uncertainty is surely the result of thinking about F.
20 November. Was at the cinema. Lolotte. The good minister. The little bicycle. The reconciliation of the parents. Was tremendously entertained. Before it, a sad
film, The Accident on the Dock, after it, the gay Alone at Last. Am entirely empty and insensible, the passing tram has more living feeling.
21 November. Dream: The French cabinet, four men, is sitting around a table. A conference is taking place. I remember the man sitting on the long right side of the
table, with his face flattened out in profile, yellowish-colored skin, his very straight nose jutting far forward (jutting so far forward because of the flatness of his face) and
an oily, black, heavy moustache arching over his mouth.