would it not be at the expense of my writing? Not that, not that!
7. Alone, I could perhaps some day really give up my job. Married, it will never be possible.
In our class, the fifth class of the Amalia Gymnasium, there was a boy named Friedrich Guss whom we all hated very much. If we came into the classroom early and
saw him sitting in his place near the stove we could hardly understand how he could have pulled himself together to come to school again. But I’m not telling it right.
We didn’t hate only him, we hated everyone. We were a terrible confederacy. Once, when the District School Inspector was present at a lesson—it was a geography
lesson and the professor, his eyes turned to the blackboard or the window like all our professors, was describing the Morea Pennsula—
It was the first day of school, evening was already approaching. The professors of the Obergymnasium were still sitting in the staff room, studying the lists of pupils,
preparing new roll books, talking about their vacation trips.
Miserable creature that I am!
Just whip the horse properly! Dig the spurs into him slowly, then pull them out with a jerk, but now let them bite into the flesh with all your strength.
What an extremity!
Were we crazy? We ran through the park at night swinging branches.
I sailed a boat into a small, natural bay.
While I was at the Gymnasium, now and then I used to visit a certain Josef Mack, a friend of my dead father. When, after graduation from the Gymnasium, I—
While he was at the Gymnasium Hugo Seifert now and then used to pay a visit to a certain Josef Kiemann, an old bachelor who had been a friend of Hugo’s dead
father. The visits suddenly ceased when Hugo, who received the offer of a job abroad which he had to accept at once, left his home town for several years. When he
returned he intended to visit the old man, but he found no opportunity, perhaps such a visit would not have suited his changed views, and although he often went through
the street where Kiemann lived and several times even saw him leaning out of the window and was probably noticed by him too, he neglected to pay the visit.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Weakness, self-destruction, tip of a flame of hell piercing the floor.
23 July. With Felix in Rostock. The bursting sexuality of the women. Their natural impurity. The flirtation, senseless for me, with little Lena. The sight of a stout
woman hunched up in a basket chair, one foot curiously pushed backwards, who was sewing something and talking to an old woman, probably an old spinster, whose
teeth appeared unusually large on one side of her mouth. The full-bloodedness and wisdom of the pregnant woman. Her behind almost faceted by evenly divided
planes. The life on the small terrace. How I coldly took the little girl on my lap, not at all unhappy about the coolness.
How childishly a tinker, seen through the open door of his shop, sits at his work and keeps striking with his hammer.
Roskoff, History of the Devil: Among the present-day Caribs, “he who works at night” is regarded as the creator of the world.
13 August. Perhaps everything is now ended and the letter I wrote yesterday was the last one. That would certainly be the best. What I shall suffer, what she will
suffer—that cannot be compared with the common suffering that would result. I shall gradually pull myself together, she will marry, that is the only way out among the
living. We cannot beat a path into the rock for the two of us, it is enough that we wept and tortured ourselves for a year. She will realize this from my last letters. If
not, then I will certainly marry her, for I am too weak to resist her opinion about our common fortune and am unable not to carry out, as far as I can, something she
considers possible.
Yesterday evening on the Belvedere under the stars.
14 August. The opposite has happened. There were three letters. The last letter I could not resist. I love her as far as I am capable of it, but the love lies buried to the