"Franz_Kafka_-_Diaries_1912" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kafka Franz)

3 January. Read a good deal in Die Neue Rundschau. Beginning of the novel Der Nackte Mann [The Naked Man]. The clarity of the whole a little too thin,
sureness in the details. Gabriel Schillings Flucht {Gabriel Schilling's Flight] by Hauptmann. Education of people. Instructive in the bad and the good.


New Year's Eve I had planned to read to Max from the diaries in the afternoon, I looked forward to it, and it did not come off. We were not in tune, I felt a calculating
pettiness and haste in him that afternoon, he was almost not my friend but nevertheless still dominated me to the extent that through his eyes I saw myself uselessly
leafing through the notebooks over and over again, and found this leafing back and forth, which continually showed the same pages flying by, disgusting. It was naturally
impossible to work together in this mutual tension, and the one page of Richard and Samuel that we finished amidst mutual resistance is simply proof of Max's energy,
but otherwise bad. New Year's Eve at Cada's. Not so bad, because Weltsch, Kisch, and someone else added new blood so that finally, although only within the limits
of that group, I again found my way back to Max. I then pressed his hand on the crowded Graben, though without looking at him, and with my three notebooks pressed
to me, as I remember, proudly went straight home.


The fern-shaped flames blazing up from a melting pot on the street in front of a building under construction.


It is easy to recognize a concentration in me of all my forces on writing. When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my
being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection,
and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even
halfway serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the
office, but that interferes with it completely. In any case I shouldn't complain that I can't put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I
do of music and have to resign myself to the most superficial efforts I may pick up, that on New Year's Eve I dined on parsnips and spinach, washed down with a glass
of Ceres, and that on Sunday I was unable to take part in Max's lecture on his philosophical workЧthe compensation for all this is clear as day. My development is now
complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which,
with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.


The sudden turn a conversation takes when in the discussion, which at first has dealt in detail with worries of the inner existence, the question is raised (not really
breaking the conversation off, but naturally not growing out of it, either) of when and where one will meet the next time and the circumstances that must be considered
in deciding this. And if the conversation also ends with a shaking of hands, then one takes one's leave with momentary faith in the pure, firm structure of our life and
with respect for it.


In an autobiography one cannot avoid writing УoftenФ where truth would require that УonceФ be written. For one always remains conscious that the word УonceФ
explodes that darkness on which the memory draws; and though it is not altogether spared by the word Уoften,Ф either, it is at least preserved in the opinion of the writer,
and he is carried across parts which perhaps never existed at all in his life but serve him as a substitute for those which his memory can no longer guess at.



4 January. It is only because of my vanity that I like so much to read to my sisters (so that today, for instance, it is already too late to write). Not that I am convinced
that I shall achieve something significant in the reading, it is only that I am dominated by the passion to get so close to the good works I read that I merge with them, not
through my own merit, indeed, but only through the attentiveness of my listening sisters, which has been excited by what is being read and is unresponsive to inessentials;
and therefore too, under the concealment my vanity affords me, I can share as creator in the effect which the work alone has exercised. That is why I really read
admirably to my sisters and stress the accents with extreme exactness just as I feel them, because later I am abundantly rewarded not only by myself but also by my
sisters.


But if I read to Brod or Baum or others, just because of my pretensions my reading must appear horribly bad to everyone, even if they know nothing of the usual quality
of my reading; for here I know that the listener is fully aware of the separation between me and what is being read, here I cannot merge completely with what I read