The Diaries of Franz Kafka Read Online Free Page A

letting them bob up and down in the balance. Whatever advantage the future has in size, the past compensates for in weight, and at their end the two are indeed no longer distinguishable, earliest youth later becomes distinct, as the future is, and the end of the future is really already experienced in all our sighs, and thus becomes the past. So this circle along whose rim we move almost closes. Well, this circle indeed belongs to us, but belongs to us only so long as we keep to it, if we move to the side just once, in any chance forgetting of self, in some distraction, some fright, some astonishment, some fatigue, we have already lost it into space, until now we had our noses stuck into the tide of the times, now we step back, former swimmers, present walkers, and are lost. We are outside the law, no one knows it and yet everyone treats us accordingly.’
    ‘You mustn’t think of me now. And how can you want to compareyourself with me? I have been here in the city for more than twenty years already. Can you even imagine what that means? I have spent each season here twenty times’ – Here he shook his slack fist over our heads – ‘The trees have been growing here for twenty years, how small should a person become under them. And all these nights, you know, in all the houses. Now you lie against this, now against that wall, so that the window keeps moving around you. And these mornings, you look out of the window, move the chair away from the bed and sit down to coffee. And these evenings, you prop up your arm and hold your ear in your hand. Yes, if only that weren’t all! If only you at least acquired a few new habits such as you can see here in the streets every day – Now it perhaps seems to you as though I wanted to complain about it? But no, why complain about it, after all neither the one nor the other is permitted me. I must just take my walks and that must be sufficient, but in compensation there is no place in all the world where I could not take my walks. But now it looks again as though I were being vain of it.’
    ‘I have it easy, then. I shouldn’t have stopped here in front of the house.’
    ‘Therefore don’t compare yourself in that with me and don’t let me make you doubtful. You are after all a grown man, are besides, as it seems, fairly forsaken here in the city.’
    I am indeed close to being so. Already, what protected me seemed to dissolve here in the city. I was beautiful in the early days, for this dissolution takes place as an apotheosis, in which everything that holds us to life flies away, but even in flying away illumines us for the last time with its human light. So I stand before my bachelor and most probably he loves me for it, but without himself really knowing why. Occasionally his words seem to indicate that he knows himself thoroughly, that he knows whom he has before him and that he may therefore allow himself anything. No, it is not so, however. He would rather meet everyone this same way, for he can live only as a hermit or a parasite. He is a hermit only by compulsion, once this compulsion is overcome by forces unknown to him, at once he is a parasite who behaves insolently whenever he possibly can. Of course, nothing in the world can save him any longer and so his conduct can make one think of the corpse of a drowned man which, borne to the surface by somecurrent, bumps against a tired swimmer, lays its hands upon him and would like to hold on. The corpse does not come alive, indeed is not even saved, but it can pull the man down.
    ‘You,’ I said, and gave him a little shove with my knee (at this sudden utterance some saliva flew from my mouth as an evil omen), ‘now you’re falling asleep.’
    ‘I haven’t forgotten you,’ he said, and shook his head while he was still opening his eyes.
    ‘I wasn’t afraid of it either,’ I said. I ignored his smile and looked down on the pavement. ‘I just wanted to tell you that now, come what may, I am going up. For, as you