The Diaries of Franz Kafka Read Online Free Page B

know, I have been invited up there, it is already late and the company is waiting for me. Perhaps some arrangements have been put off until I come. I don’t insist it is so, but it is always possible. You will now ask me whether I could not perhaps forgo the company altogether.’
    ‘I won’t, for in the first place you are burning to tell me, and in the second place it doesn’t interest me at all, down here and up there are all the same to me. Whether I lie here in the gutter and stow away the rain water or drink champagne up there with the same lips makes no difference to me, not even in the taste, for which, besides, I easily console myself, for neither the one nor the other is permitted me and therefore it is not right for me to compare myself to you. And you! How long really have you been in the city? How long have you been in the city, I ask?’
    ‘Five months. But still, I know it well enough already. You, I have given myself no rest. When I look back like this I don’t know at all whether there have been any nights, everything looks to me, can you imagine, like one day without any mornings, afternoons, and evenings, even without any differences in light.’
    6 November. Lecture by a Madame Ch. on Musset. Jewish women’s habit of lip-smacking. Understand French through all the preliminaries and complications of the anecdote, until, right before the last word, which should live on in the heart on the ruins of the whole anecdote, the French disappears before our eyes, perhaps we have strained ourselves too much up to that point, the people who understand French leave before the end, they have already heard enough, the othershaven’t yet heard nearly enough, acoustics of the hall which favour the coughing in the boxes more than the words of the lecturer. Supper at Rachel’s, she is reading Racine’s
Phèdre
with Musset, the book lies between them on the table upon which in addition there is everything else imaginable lying.
    Consul Claudel, 5 brilliance in his eyes, which his broad face picks up and reflects, he keeps wanting to say good-bye, he succeeds in part too, but not entirely, for when he says good-bye to one, another is standing there who is joined again by the one to whom good-bye has already been said. Over the lecture platform is a balcony for the orchestra. All possible sorts of noise disturb. Waiters from the corridor, guests in their rooms, a piano, a distant string orchestra, hammering, finally a squabble that is irritating because of the difficulty of telling where it is taking place. In a box a lady with diamonds in her ear-rings that sparkle almost uninterruptedly. At the box office young, black-clothed people of a French Circle. One of them makes a sharp bow in greeting that causes his eyes to sweep across the floor. At the same time he smiles broadly. But he does this only before girls, immediately after he looks the men straight in the face with his mouth solemnly pursed, by which he at the same time declares the former greeting to be perhaps a ridiculous but in any case unavoidable ceremony.
    7 November. Lecture by Wiegler 6 on Hebbel. Sits on the stage against a set representing a modern room as if his beloved will bound in through a door to begin the play at last. No, he lectures. Hunger of Hebbel. Complicated relationship with Elisa Lensing. In school he has an old maid for a teacher who smokes, takes snuff, thrashes, and gives the good ones raisins. He travels everywhere (Heidelberg, Munich, Paris) with no real apparent purpose. Is at first a servant of a parish bailiff, sleeps in the same bed with the coachman under the steps.
    Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld – drawing by Friedrich Olivier, he is sketching on a slope, how pretty and earnest he is there (a high hat like a flattened clown’s cap with a stiff, narrow brim extends over his face, curly, long hair, eyes only for his picture, quiet hands, the board on his knees, one foot has slipped down a little on the slope). But no, that