WOMAN [raising the distaff to protect herself ]: No one was here. Let me alone!
20 July. Down on the river lay several boats, fishermen had cast their lines, it was a dreary day. Some youths, their legs crossed, were leaning against the railing of the
dock.
When they rose to toast her departure, lifting up their champagne glasses, the dawn had already broken. Her parents and several wedding guests escorted her to the
carriage.
21 July. Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means
that you are alive. And if they don’t then everything is over with here, once and for all.
I cannot sleep. Only dreams, no sleep. Today, in my dream, I invented a new kind of vehicle for a park slope. You take a branch, it needn’t be very strong, prop it up
on the ground at a slight angle, hold one end in your hand, sit down on it side-saddle, then the whole branch naturally rushes down the slope, since you are sitting on the
bough you are carried along at full speed, rocking comfortably on the elastic wood. It is also possible to use the branch to ride up again. The chief advantage, aside
from the simplicity of the whole device, lies in the fact that the branch, thin and flexible as it is, can be lowered or raised as necessary and gets through anywhere, even
where a person by himself would get through only with difficulty.
To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around one’s neck and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture,
walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last fragments of me when it breaks through the
roof tiles, is seen on the roof.
Special methods of thinking. Permeated with emotion. Everything feels itself to be a thought, even the vaguest feelings (Dostoyevsky).
This block and tackle of the inner being. A small lever is somewhere secretly released, one is hardly aware of it at first, and at once the whole apparatus is in motion.
Subject to an incomprehensible power, as the watch seems subject to time, it creaks here and there, and all the chains clank down their prescribed path one after the
other.
Summary of all the arguments for and against my marriage:
1. Inability to endure life alone, which does not imply inability to live, quite the contrary, it is even improbable that I know how to live with anyone, but I am incapable,
alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person, the attacks of time and old age, the vague pressure of the desire to write, sleeplessness, the
nearness of insanity—I cannot bear all this alone. I naturally add a “perhaps” to this. The connection with F. will give my existence more strength to resist.
2. Everything immediately gives me pause. Every joke in the comic paper, what I remember about Flaubert and Grillparzer, the sight of the nightshirts on my parents’
beds, laid out for the night, Max’s marriage. Yesterday my sister said, “All the married people (that we know) are happy, I don’t understand it,” this remark too gave me
pause, I became afraid again.
3. I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.
4. I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my
relatives bore me to my soul. Conversations take the importance, the seriousness, the truth of everything I think.
5. The fear of the connection, of passing into the other. Then I’ll never be alone again.
6. In the past, especially, the person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless,
powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write. If through the intermediation of my wife I could be like that in the presence of everyone! But then