5 June. The inner advantages that mediocre literary works derive from the fact that their authors are still alive and present behind them. The real sense of growing old.
Löwy, story about crossing the frontier.
21 June. The anxiety I suffer from all sides. The examination by the doctor, the way he presses forward against me, I virtually empty myself out and he makes his
empty speeches into me, despised and unrefuted.
The tremendous world I have in my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in
me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
On a cold spring morning about five o’clock a tall man in a cloak that reached to his feet knocked with his fist against the door of a small hut which stood in a bare, hilly
region. The moon was still white and bright in the sky. After each blow of his fist he listened, within the hut there was silence.
1 July. The wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude. To be face to face only with myself. Perhaps I shall have it in Riva.
Day before yesterday with Weiss, author of Die Galeere. Jewish physician, Jew of the kind that is closest to the type of the Western European Jew and to whom one
therefore immediately feels close. The tremendous advantage of Christians who always have and enjoy such feelings of closeness in general intercourse, for instance a
Christian Czech among Christian Czechs.
The honeymoon couple that came out of the Hotel de Saxe. In the afternoon. Dropping the card in the mailbox. Wrinkled clothing, lazy pace, dreary, tepid afternoon.
Faces scarcely individualized at first sight.
The picture of the celebration of the Romanov tercentenary in Yaroslavl on the Volga. The Tsar, the annoyed princesses standing in the sun, only one—delicate, elderly,
indolent, leaning on her parasol—is looking straight ahead. The heir to the throne on the arm of the huge, bareheaded Cossack. In another picture, men who had long
since passed by are saluting in the distance.
The millionaire in the motion picture Slaves of Gold. Mustn’t forget him. The calmness, the slow movement, conscious of its goal, a faster step when necessary, a
shrug of the shoulder. Rich, spoiled, lulled to sleep, but how he springs up like a servant and searches the room into which he was locked in the forest tavern.
2 July. Wept over the report of the trial of twenty-three year old Marie Abraham who, because of poverty and hunger, strangled her not quite nine month old child,
Barbara, with a man’s tie that she used as a garter. Very routine story.
The fire with which, in the bathroom, I described to my sister a funny motion picture. Why can I never do that in the presence of strangers?
I would never have married a girl with whom I had lived in the same city for a year.
3 July. The broadening and heightening of existence through marriage. Sermon text. But I almost sense it.
When I say something it immediately and finally loses its importance, when I write it down it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.
A band of little golden beads around a tanned throat.
19 July. Out of a house there stepped four armed men. Each held a halberd upright before him. Now and then one of them looked to the rear to see whether he was
coming on whose account they were standing here. It was early in the morning, the street was entirely empty.
So what do you want? Come!—We do not want to. Leave us!
All the inner effort just for this! That is why the music from the coffeehouse rings so in one’s ear. The stone’s throw about which Elsa B. spoke becomes visible.
[A woman is sitting at the distaff. A man pushes the door open with a sword which is sheathed in its scabbard (he is holding it loosely in his hand).]
MAN: He was here!
WOMAN: Who? What do you want?
MAN: The horse thief. He is hiding here. Don’t lie! [He brandishes the sword.]