give her good ones because she needed them for only two days until her linen arrived from Vienna; they aren’t permitted to take back used articles because of the
danger of cholera.
Mrs. Lustig, with a lot of children of every size and her fresh, self-assured, sprightly little sister. She spent so much time looking for a dress for a little girl that Mrs.
Brod shouted at her: “Now you take this or you won’t get anything.” But then Mrs. Lustig answered in an even louder shout, ending with a wide, violent sweep of her
arm: “The mitzveh [good deed] is worth more than all these shmattes [rags].”
25 November. Utter despair, impossible to pull myself together; only when I have become satisfied with my sufferings can I stop.
30 November. I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood
begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me. And I have become cold again, and insensible; nothing is left but a senile love
for unbroken calm. And like some kind of beast at the farthest pole from man, I shift my neck from side to side again and for the time being should like to try again to
have F. back. I’ll really try it, if the nausea I feel for myself doesn’t prevent me.
2 December. Afternoon at Werfel’s with Max and Pick. Read “In the Penal Colony” aloud; am not entirely dissatisfied, except for its glaring and ineradicable faults.
Werfel read some poems and two acts of Esther, Kaiserin von Persien (Esther, Empress of Persia). The acts carry one away. But I am easily carried away. The
criticisms and comparisons put forward by Max, who was not entirely satisfied with the piece, disturb me, and I am no longer so sure of my impression of the play as a
whole as I was while listening to it, when it overwhelmed me. I remember the Yiddish actors. W.’s handsome sisters. The elder one leaned against the chair, often
looked at the mirror out of the corner of her eye, and then—as if she were not already devoured by my eyes—gently pointed a finger to a brooch pinned to her blouse.
It was a low-cut dark blue blouse, her throat was covered with a tulle scarf. Repeated account of something that happened at the theater: some officers kept saying to
each other in a loud voice during Kabale und Liebe: “Speckbacher is cutting a figure,” by which they meant an officer leaning against the side of a box.
The day’s conclusion, even before meeting Werfel: Go on working regardless of everything; a pity I can’t work today, for I am tired and have a headache, already had
preliminary twinges in the office this morning. I’ll go on working regardless of everything, it must be possible in spite of the office or the lack of sleep.
Dreamed tonight. With Kaiser Wilhelm. In the castle. The beautiful view. A room similar to that in the Tabakskollegium. Meeting with Matilde Serav. Unfortunately
forgot everything.
From Esther: God’s masterpieces fart at one another in the bath.
5 December. A letter from E. on the situation in her family. My relation to her family has a consistent meaning only if I conceive of myself as its ruin. This is the only
natural explanation there is to make plausible everything that is astonishing in the relation. It is also the only connection I have at the moment with her family; otherwise
I am completely divorced from it emotionally, although not more effectually, perhaps, than I am from the whole world. (A picture of my existence apropos of this would
portray a useless stake covered with snow and frost, fixed loosely and slantwise into the ground in a deeply ploughed field on the edge of a great plain on a dark winter’s
night.) Only ruin has effect. I have made F. unhappy, weakened the resistance of all those who need her so much now, contributed to the death of her father, come
between F. and E., and in the end made E. unhappy too, an unhappiness that gives every indication of growing worse. I am in the harness and it is my fate to pull the