housekeeper.
The housekeeper’s poodle that sits downstairs on a step and listens when I begin tramping down from the fourth floor, looks at me when I pass by. Pleasant feeling of
intimacy, since he is not frightened by me and includes me in the familiar house and its noise.
Picture: Baptism of the cabin boys when crossing the equator. The sailors lounging around. The ship, clambered over in every direction and at every level, everywhere
provides them with places to sit. The tall sailors hanging on the ship’s ladders, one foot in front of the other, pressing their powerful, round shoulders against the side of
the ship and looking down on the play.
[A small room. ELSA and GERTRUD are sitting at the window with their needlework. It is beginning to get dark.]
E: Someone is ringing. [Both listen.]
G: Was there really a ring? I didn’t hear anything, I keep hearing less all the time.
E: It was just very low. [Goes into the anteroom to open the door. A few words are exchanged. Then the voice.]
E: Please step in here. Be careful not to stumble. Please walk ahead, there’s only my sister in the room.
Recently the cattle-dealer Morsin told us the following story. He was still excited when he told it, despite the fact that the matter is several months old now:
“I very often have business in the city, on the average it certainly comes to ten days a month. Since I must usually spend the night there too, and have always tried,
whenever it is at all possible, to avoid stopping at a hotel, I rented a private room that simply—”
4 December. Viewed from the outside it is terrible for a young but mature person to die, or worse, to kill himself. Hopelessly to depart in a complete confusion that
would make sense only within a further development, or with the sole hope that in the great account this appearance in life will be considered as not having taken place.
Such would be my plight now. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a
person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness
consists only in its incomprehensibility.
A group of men, masters and servants. Rough-hewn faces shining with living colors. The master sits down and the servant brings him food on a tray. Between the two
there is no greater difference, no difference of another category than, for instance, that between a man who as a result of countless circumstances is an Englishman and
lives in London, and another who is a Laplander and at the very same instant is sailing on the sea, alone in his boat during a storm. Certainly the servant can—and this
only under certain conditions—become a master, but this question, no matter how it may be answered, does not change anything here, for this is a matter that concerns
the present evaluation of a present situation.
The unity of mankind, now and then doubted, even if only emotionally, by everyone, even by the most approachable and adaptable person, on the other hand also reveals
itself to everyone, or seems to reveal itself, in the complete harmony, discernible time and again, between the development of mankind as a whole and of the individual
man. Even in the most secret emotions of the individual.
The fear of folly. To see folly in every emotion that strives straight ahead and makes one forget everything else. What, then, is non-folly? Non-folly is to stand like a
beggar before the threshold, to one side of the entrance, to rot and collapse. But P. and O. are really disgusting fools. There must be follies greater than those who
perpetrate them. What is disgusting, perhaps, is this puffing-themselves-up of the little fools in their great folly. But did not Christ appear in the same light to the
Pharisees?
Wonderful, entirely self-contradictory idea that someone who died at 3 a.m., for instance, immediately thereafter, about dawn, enters into a higher life. What