7 October. I have taken a week’s vacation to push the novel on. Until today—it is Wednesday night, my vacation ends Monday—it has been a failure. I have written
little and feebly. Even last week I was on the decline, but could not foresee that it would prove so bad. Are these three days enough to warrant the conclusion that I am
unworthy of living without the office?
15 October. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally. Today, Thursday (Monday my holiday is over, I have taken an additional week), a
letter from Miss Bl. I don’t know what to do about it, I know it is certain that I shall live on alone (if I live at all—which is not certain), I also don’t know whether I love
F. (I remember the aversion I felt at the sight of her dancing with her severe eyes lowered, or when she ran her hand over her nose and hair in the Askanischer Hof
shortly before she left, and the numberless moments of complete estrangement); but in spite of everything the enormous temptation returns again. I played with the
letter all through the evening; I don’t work though I could (even if I’ve had excruciating headaches this whole past week). I’m noting down from memory the letter I
wrote to Miss Bl.:
What a strange coincidence, Grete, that it was just today I received your letter. I will not say with what it coincided, that concerns only me and the things that were
troubling me tonight as I went to bed, about three. (Suicide; letter full of instructions to Max.)
Your letter was a great surprise to me. Not because you wrote to me. Why shouldn’t you write to me? Though you do say that I hate you; but it isn’t true. Were
the whole world to hate you, I still shouldn’t, and not only because I have no right to do so. You sat as a judge over me in the Askanischer Hof—it was awful for you,
for me, for everyone—but it only seemed so; in reality all the time I was sitting in your place and sit there to this day.
You are completely mistaken about F. I don’t say this to worm details from you. I can think of no detail—and my imagination has so often gone back and forth
across this ground that I can trust it—I say I can think of no detail that could persuade me you are not mistaken. What you suggest is completely impossible; it makes
me unhappy to think that F. should perhaps be deceiving herself for some undiscoverable reason. But that is also impossible.
I have always believed your interest to be honest and free from any personal consideration. Nor was your last letter an easy one to write. I warmly thank you for it.
What did this accomplish? The letter sounds unyielding, but only because I was ashamed, because I considered it irresponsible, because I was afraid to be yielding; by
no means because I did not want to yield. That was the only thing I did want. It would be best for all of us if she would not answer, but she will answer and I shall wait
for her answer.
. . . I have now lived calmly for two months without any real contact with F. (except through the correspondence with E.), have dreamed of F. as though of someone
who was dead and could never live again, and now, when I am offered a chance to come near her, she is at once the center of everything again. She is probably also
interfering with my work. How very much a stranger she has sometimes seemed to me these latter days when I would think of her, of all the people I had ever met the
most remote; though at the same time I told myself that this was simply because F. had been closer to me than any other person, or at least had been thrust so close to
me by other people.
Leafed through the diary a little. Got a kind of inkling of the way a life like this is constituted.
21 October. For four days almost no work at all, only an hour or so all the time and only a few lines, but slept better; as a result almost got rid of my headaches. No