incompatibility there is between the visibly human and everything else! How out of one mystery there always comes a greater one! In the first moment the breath
leaves the human calculator. Really one should be afraid to step out of one’s house.
5 December. How furious I am with my mother! I need only begin to talk to her and I am irritated, almost scream.
O. is really suffering and I do not believe that she is suffering, that she is capable of suffering, do not believe it in the face of my knowing better, do not believe it in order
not to have to stand by her, which I could not do, for she irritates me too.
Externally I see only little details of F., at least sometimes, so few they may be counted. By these her picture is made clear, pure, original, distinct, and lofty, all at once.
8 December. Artificial constructions in Weiss’s novel. The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience. I want peace, step by step or running,
but not calculated leaps by grasshoppers.
9 December. Weiss’s Galeere. Weakening of the effect when the end of the story begins. The world is conquered and we have watched it with open eyes. We can
therefore quietly turn away and live on.
Hatred of active introspection. Explanations of one’s soul, such as: Yesterday I was so, and for this reason; today I am so, and for this reason. It is not true, not for this
reason and not for that reason, and therefore also not so and so. To put up with oneself calmly, without being precipitate, to live as one must, not to chase one’s tail like
a dog.
I fell asleep in the underbush. A noise awakened me. I found in my hands a book in which I had previously been reading. I threw it away and sprang up. It was
shortly after midday; in front of the hill on which I stood there lay spread out a great lowland with villages and ponds and uniformly shaped, tall, reed-like hedges
between them. I put my hands on my hips, examined everything with my eyes, and at the same time listened to the noise.
10 December. Discoveries have forced themselves on people.
The laughing, boyish, sly, revealing face of the chief inspector, a face that I have never before seen him wear and noticed only today at the moment when I was reading
him a report by the director and happened to glance up from it. At the same time he also stuck his right hand into his trouser pocket with a shrug of his shoulder as
though he were another person.
It is never possible to take note of and evaluate all the circumstances that influence the mood of the moment, are even at work within it, and finally are at work in the
evaluation, hence it is false to say that I felt resolute yesterday, that I am in despair today. Such differentiations only prove that one desires to influence oneself, and, as
far removed from oneself as possible, hidden behind prejudices and fantasies, temporarily to create an artificial life, as sometimes someone in the corner of a tavern
sufficiently concealed behind a small glass of whisky, entirely alone with himself, entertains himself with nothing but false, unprovable imaginings and dreams.
Towards midnight a young man in a tight, pale gray, checked overcoat sprinkled with snow came down the stairs into the little music hall. He paid his admission at the
cashier’s desk behind which a dozing young lady started up and looked straight at him with large, black eyes, and then he stopped for a moment to survey the hall lying
three steps below him.
Almost every evening I go to the railway station; today, because it was raining, I walked up and down the hall there for half an hour. The boy who kept eating candy
from the slot machine. His reaching into his pocket, out of which he pulls a pile of change, the careless dropping of a coin into the slot, reading the labels while he eats,
the dropping of some pieces which he picks up from the dirty door and sticks right into his mouth. The man, calmly chewing, who is speaking confidentially at the