Now read in Dostoyevsky the passage that reminds me so of my “being unhappy.”
When I put my left hand inside my trousers while I was reading and felt the lukewarm upper part of my thigh.
15 December. Letters to Dr. Weiss and Uncle Alfred. No telegram came.
Read Wir Jungen von 1870-1. Again read with suppressed sobs of the victories and scenes of enthusiasm. To be a father and speak calmly to one’s son. For this,
however, one shouldn’t have a little toy hammer in place of a heart.
“Have you written to your uncle yet?” my mother asked me, as I had maliciously been expecting for some time. She had long been watching me with concern, for
various reasons did not dare in the first place to ask me, and in the second place to ask me in front of my father, and at last, in her concern when she saw that I was
about to leave, asked me nevertheless. When I passed behind her chair she looked up from her cards, turned her face to me with a long-vanished, tender motion
somehow revived for the moment, and asked me, looking up only furtively, smiling shyly, and already humbled in the asking of the question, before any answer had been
received.
16 December. “The thundering scream of the seraphim’s delight.”
I sat in the rocking chair at Weltsch’s, we spoke of the disorder of our lives, he always with a certain confidence (“One must want the impossible”), I without it, eyeing
my fingers with the feeling that I was the representative of my inner emptiness, an emptiness that replaces everything else and is not even very great.
17 December. Letter to W. commissioning him “to overflow and yet be only a pot on the cold hearth.”
Lecture by Bergmann, “Moses and the Present.” Pure impression—In any event I have nothing to do with it. The truly terrible paths between freedom and slavery
cross each other with no guide to the way ahead and accompanied by an immediate obliterating of those paths already traversed. There are a countless number of such
paths, or only one, it cannot be determined, for there is no vantage ground from which to observe. There am I. I cannot leave. I have nothing to complain about. I do
not suffer excessively, for I do not suffer consistently, it does not pile up, at least I do not feel it for the time being, and the degree of my suffering is far less than the
suffering that is perhaps my due.
The silhouette of a man who, his arms half raised at different levels, confronts the thick mist in order to enter it.
The good, strong way in which Judaism separates things. There is room there for a person. One sees oneself better, one judges oneself better.
18 December. I am going to sleep, I am tired. Perhaps it has already been decided there. Many dreams about it.
19 December. Letter from F. Beautiful morning, warmth in my blood.
20 December. No letter.
The effect of a peaceful face, calm speech, especially when exercised by a strange person one hasn’t seen through yet. The voice of God out of a human mouth.
An old man walked through the streets in the mist one winter evening. It was icy cold. The streets were empty. No one passed near him, only now and then he saw in
the distance, half concealed by the mist, a tall policeman or a woman in furs or shawls. Nothing troubled him, he merely intended to visit a friend at whose house he had
not been for a long time and who had just now sent a servant girl to ask him to come.
It was long past midnight when there came a soft knock on the door of the room of the merchant Messner. It wasn’t necessary to wake him, he fell asleep only towards
morning, and until that time he used to lie awake in bed on his belly, his face pressed into the pillow, his arms extended, and his hands clasped over his head. He had
heard the knocking immediately. “Who is it?” he asked. An indistinct murmur, softer than the knocking, replied. “The door is open,” he said, and turned on the electric