Clear night on the way home; distinctly aware of what in me is mere dull apathy, so far removed from a great clarity expanding without hindrance.
Nikolai Literaturbriefe (Letters on Literature).
There are possibilities for me, certainly, but under what stone do they lie?
Carried forward on the horse—
Youth’s meaninglessness. Fear of youth, fear of meaninglessness, of the meaningless rise of an inhuman life.
Tellheim: “He has—what only the creations of true poets possess—that spontaneous flexibility of the inner life which, as circumstances alter, continually surprises us by
revealing entirely new facets of itself.”
19 January. Anxiety alternating with self-assurance at the office. Otherwise more confident. Great antipathy to “Metamorphosis.” Unreadable ending. Imperfect
almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.
23 January. B., the chief auditor, tells the story of a friend of his, a half-pay colonel who likes to sleep beside an open window: “During the night it is very pleasant; but
in the morning, when I have to shovel the snow off the ottoman near the window and then start shaving, it is unpleasant.”
Memoirs of Countess Thürheim: “Her gentle nature made her especially fond of Racine. I have often heard her praying God that He might grant him eternal peace.”
There is no doubt that at the great dinners given in his honor at Vienna by the Russian ambassador Count Rasumovsky, he (Suvorov) ate like a glutton the food served
upon the table without pausing for a soul. When he was full he would get up and leave the guests to themselves.
To judge by an engraving, a frail, determined, pedantic old man.
“It wasn’t your fate,” my mother’s lame consolation. The bad part of it is, that at the moment it is almost all the consolation that I need. There is my weak point and will
remain my weak point; otherwise the regular, hardly varying, semi-active life I have led these last days (worked at the office on a description of our bureau’s activities;
A.’s worries about his bride; Ottla’s Zionism; the girls’ enjoyment of the Salten-Schildkraut lecture; reading the memoirs of Thurheim; letters to Weiss and Löwy;
proof-reading “Metamorphosis”) has really pulled me together and instilled some resolution and hope in me.
24 January. Napoleonic era: the festivities came hard upon each other, everyone was in a hurry “to taste to the full the joys of thc brief interlude of peace.” “On the
other hand, the women exercised an influence as if in passing, they had really no time to lose. In those days love expressed itself in an intensified enthusiasm and a
greater abandonment.” “In our time there is no longer any excuse for passing an empty hour.”
Incapable of writing a few lines to Miss Bl. (Grete Bloch), two letters already remain unanswered, today the third came. I grasp nothing correctly and at the same time
I feel quite hale, though hollow. Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves
down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least)
sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.”
A. cannot calm himself. In spite of the confidence he has in me and in spite of the fact that he wants my advice, I always learn the worst details only incidentally in the
course of the conversation, whereupon I have always to suppress my sudden astonishment as much as I can—not without a feeling that my indifference in face of the
dreadful news either must strike him as coldness, or on the contrary must greatly console him. And in fact so I mean it. I learn the story of the kiss in the following
stages, some of them weeks apart: A teacher kissed her; she was in his room; he kissed her several times; she went to his room regularly because she was doing some