window with a woman, a relative.
11 December. In Toynbee Hall read the beginning of Michael Kohlhaas. Complete and utter fiasco. Badly chosen, badly presented, finally swam senselessly around
in the text. Model audience. Very small boys in the front row. One of them tries to overcome his innocent boredom by carefully throwing his cap on the floor and then
carefully picking it up, and then again, over and over. Since he is too small to accomplish this from his seat, he has to keep sliding off the chair a little. Read wildly and
badly and carelessly and unintelligibly. And in the afternoon I was already trembling with eagerness to read, could hardly keep my mouth shut.
No push is really needed, only a withdrawal of the last force placed at my disposal, and I fall into a despair that rips me to pieces. Today, when I imagined that I would
certainly be calm during the lecture, I asked myself what sort of calm this would be, on what it would be based, and I could only say that it would merely be a calm for
its own sake, an incomprehensible grace, nothing else.
12 December. And in the morning I got up relatively quite fresh.
Yesterday, on my way home, the little boy bundled in gray who was running along beside a group of boys, hitting himself on the thigh, catching hold of another boy with
his other hand, and shouting rather absentmindedly, which I must not forget—“Dnes to bylo docela hezky” [“Very nicely done today”].
The freshness with which, after a somewhat altered division of the day, I walked along the street about six o’clock today. Ridiculous observation, when will I get rid of
this habit.
I looked closely at myself in the mirror a while ago—though only by artificial light and with the light coming from behind me, so that actually only the down at the edges
of my ears was illuminated—and my face, even after fairly close examination, appeared to me better than I know it to be. A clear, well-shaped, almost beautifully
outlined face. The black of the hair, the brows and the eye sockets stand livingly forth from the rest of the passive mass. The glance is by no means haggard, there is
no trace of that, but neither is it childish, rather unbelievably energetic, but perhaps only because it was observing me, since I was just then observing myself and wanted
to frighten myself.
12 December. Yesterday did not fall asleep for a long time. F. B. Finally decided—and with that I fell uncertainly asleep—to ask Weiss to go to her office with a
letter, and to write nothing else in this letter other than that I must have news from her or about her and have therefore sent Weiss there so that he might write to me
about her. Meanwhile Weiss is sitting beside her desk, waits until she has finished reading the letter, bows, and—since he has no further instructions and it is highly
unlikely that he will receive an answer—leaves.
Discussion evening at the officials’ club. I presided. Funny, what sources of self-respect one can draw upon. My introductory sentence: “I must begin the discussion
this evening with a regret that it is taking place.” For I was not advised in time and therefore not prepared.
14 December. Lecture by Beerman. Nothing, but presented with a self-satisfaction that is here and there contagious. Girlish face with a goitre. Before almost every
sentence the same contraction of muscles in his face as in sneezing. A verse from the Christmas Fair in his newspaper column today.
Sir, buy it for your little lad
So he’d laugh and not be sad.
Quoted Shaw: “I am a sedentary, faint-hearted civilian.”
Wrote a letter to F. in the office.
The fright this morning on the way to the office when I met the girl from the seminar who resembles F., for the moment did not know who it was and simply saw that
she resembled F., was not F., but had some sort of further relationship to F. beyond that, namely this, that in the seminar, at the sight of her, I thought of F. a great deal.