Someone who can say nothing out loud without its coming true.
Contempt for one’s fellows must be balanced with self-contempt. If the latter prevails, then the writer is lost: he will destroy himself like Gogol. If the former prevails, the result is a prophet: arrogantly certain in his belief, he is a threat to the world, and thus ecstatically he helps bring about its destruction.
Finding the right balance.
Through the novels I finally allow myself to read, I animate the thousand figures and situations slumbering uneasily within me. Every book worth reading touches on a different part of life. I must do this, I tell myself today; I must write about that, I say tomorrow. Where should I begin, with so much waking at once? But still, if more quietly, I feel the suspicion that it is not right to work on something that was just my life. Isn’t it really unimportant who is recalling? And are sheer memories worth preserving, as if they could stand for the memories of others? And so one longs for the time when nothing was experience as yet, when everything was intuition. Only the poets who died young—Büchner, Trakl—maintained the purity of their expectations. For all the others, expectations were gradually transformed into experience. In this one respect it can be said that Kafka always stayed the same; from the beginning he had the integrity and wholeness of his old age, and he was spared the fate of getting young later on.
But that is exactly what has happened to me. I had the wisdom of old age in the intuitions of my youth. Now, at sixty, I am catching up with the foolishness of youth.
Perhaps this is the odd excitement I should be writing about, but it feels uncanny to me and I don’t trust it. And I haven’t yet found the formal medium that would serve as a legitimate structure for it.
Perhaps I am striving too much for a lost unity; perhaps—even in my work—I should let my self disintegrate into its component parts.
As soon as I concern myself with one of these parts, I have hardly begun when the others quickly announce themselves: “We are here too. Remember, you are writing a forgery if you leave us out.” And so I am scared off and keep waiting for a way to open up so as to handle them all at once.
Good old would-be father of the race! Wanted to have five hundred sons and got only one, himself…
He reveals himself as a member of all existing parties, collecting them, always finding new ones.
“Folklore” sounds like a parrot that belongs to everyone at once, to all the “folk.”
More talkative in solitude.
To see how writers are derived from specific painters, a new branch of literary criticism.
Thus we see that every name has the potential to become famous, as long as it doesn’t exceed a certain number of syllables.
Dante’s project appears to me to be ever more monstrous. Who could emulate him and call together the names of our time before such a bar of justice as his poem is? Today the hardest thing to manage is merely to judge oneself, and how proud one is just to succeed honestly in that!
No one has the integrity and trustworthiness of a judge anymore.
The judge is suspect even to himself. We don’t believe that he is a judge; we don’t believe he isn’t ashamed of it. This shame is the creation of Kafka.
If it really matters to you, get mad when you say it, or say nothing. Take off your gloves, and don’t come on too softly: it should wake you up, after all.
I so long to get free of the things that have stamped me and all the thinkers of our time and to ponder death as “impartially” as if I were a man of the previous century.
With friends we should keep an old-fashioned kind of distance, as if the telephone did not exist.
The people we don’t miss we have seen too much of; there’s nothing more to be done about it.
She speaks from the navel.
What if it were all just an overture and no one knew to what?
He sank three times, but to no avail—no one saw him. The fourth time he stayed up and no one saw him then either.
He wrote down everything God reported to him, hot off the press.
What a poet doesn’t see never happened.
A stranger: when he opened his mouth wide to yawn, I recognized him.
You are distinguished by an almost mythic pedantry; you need your monstrous exaggerations to be true.
He was a mountain and erupted. He was a tree and toppled. He was a lion and lost heart.
How much we think and will never comprehend!
Word associations: only interesting if you leave out five of six connecting links.
She laughs as if some one were tickling her, not in the right places but just slightly off.
The kindly schoolmaster who steals from his students but always just from the best.
The wiseguy from New York. He can’t speak a word of English.
Literature of leaps and literature of steps.
Wales. I’ve been in strange and beautiful places the last five days, being shown much and seeing a good deal more. The ancient language, which I did not understand but heard everywhere, has a stubbornness and strength. But in order to save it—it is waging a desperate fight for survival—the people who speak it are constantly aware of it. They point with pride to every famous man who came from their midst, saying, “He was one of us,” and perhaps it does not really matter what he was famous for. Words mean everything to them—more than a sacred scripture, they have a sacred tongue. They cling to every scrap of land that is still theirs, they cling to their dead.
I didn’t hear any preaching in this language. Occasionally, when in longer conversations I would get excited, I felt the heightened attention of others, as if they sensed some link in me to their preachers.
The most wonderful things were the call of the curlews and the huge trees in the garden.
The humility of trees: that we can plant them, that they grow at our behest, where we want them to be.
My friends showed me everything, their entire history, from the cloister at the university in Bangor, where they met, to the little registry office in Bala, where they got married, to the village houses where Eirwen lived during the war, waiting for her husband’s leave, to the country road where late one night, extremely pregnant, she got caught in a thunderstorm.
The ancient farm of their friends who spoke English only with effort. The clock inside always an hour ahead. The eighty-year-old farmer, hands spotted with paint, coming home after nine from a sheepshearing at a neighboring farm. He had worked all day; they had shorn a thousand sheep.
Earlier, at supper, his son-in-law tells stories, with the emphasis of a Japanese actor; he has a face like a fox, but his eyes are piercing and kindly like those of a saint.
His exceedingly fat wife runs out of the kitchen, in rapid succession tosses various dishes onto the table, and before the guest has quite finished what was on his plate, hops up, insisting clumsily in her high-pitched voice that he help himself right away, eat, eat.
Afterwards she hauls out of the top drawer photographs that show the family members in all combinations. We are expected to become friends with each picture.
Her husband, who is missing both his thumbs, puts on his cap and disappears to fetch the old man, who is still at work. After a while he brings him in, a sturdy man with a mustache: he makes me think of pictures of old Georgian men; will he get to be 120 as well? He deserves to.
The couple’s young son, his grandson William, slender and dark, comes into the house, so now we have a short visit with the whole family. Even the boy speaks broken English, or does it just sound that way?
The whole family walks with us across a few fields, asking us quite formally to come again, even me, the foreigner, and everyone waves a long time.
Before dinner, Megan, the wife, shows us the “Chapel.” It is on the farm, a few meters from the house, which dates from the fourteenth century. The chapel is simple and plain, a tablet on the wall, dedicated to Megan’s great-grandfather, who was the minister here:
Born 1805
Born again 1825
Died 1849
Just behind the chapel, a little churchyard, almost all the headstones slate. The immediate and extended family have been buried here for a hundred years.
So the farm contains everything: the living, the animals, the chapel, the dead; and the old language is spoken always.
Your actual affection for people overcomes you when they are no longer around.
How scrupulously the participants in his seminar dissociate themselves from Kierkegaard! As if that were necessary for such zeroes!
Structures bore me; they are foisted upon us.
I spent many hours listening to people speaking in Wales. All I understood was a name now and then. While with them, I was happy (I often feel confined with people whom I understand). The enormous latitude for conjecture in the field of a completely foreign language. False interpretations, errors, nonsense thoughts. But also expectations, overestimations, promise.
Foreign languages as oracles.
People I haven’t seen for a long time: I forget that they have died.
Imagine you are living back in your grandparents’ day and have thought up everything to do with life today, without knowing it yourself.
Animals: we are more dependent on them than they on us: they our history, we their death. When they no longer exist, we will invent them all with effort out of ourselves.
Strike: Everyone decides never to leave their houses again. From this moment on, no door, no window is ever opened.
That is how they were found, three thousand years later, intact skeletons in intact houses, the only civilization that was ever known completely.
The bull bowed down before the matador and turned its back on the red cape.
He granted the bull its life and was torn to pieces by the mob.
He regrets nothing. He regrets everything. He regrets being seen doing so.
You are almost like the English; you always use the same words. But they are yours.
Don’t say it’s too late: how can you know you don’t still have thirty years to begin a new life? Don’t say it’s too early: how can you know that you won’t be dead in a month and that other people won’t fashion lives for themselves out of the ruins of yours?
If I were made of steel, it would provoke her. I am made of words.
Whoever speaks with himself day after day, over and over again, is impressive: the power of journals.
Poems in alien surroundings have more effect on me. In inappropriate surroundings they affect me the most, for only there are they totally isolated.
I have to see many people to be alone, and it’s important that I mean nothing to them.
When I dislike people, I get gruff and tough. In the presence of those I love I am nothing. Every effect I have on others transforms me into a fool.
At peace with everyone whom we have escaped.
The sycophant tries with every means to conceal how much he values the scrap that has fallen to him.
How can it be that you are so struck by the tone of the Bible, whose God revolts you so completely? It is only about him. For without God, the Bible would not strike your heart so.
It must be grief for God that strikes you, sorrow for the tough, stubborn, passionate attempt to create and keep alive a creator who will bear the responsibility for our unhappiness.
For it is unbearable to think that this senseless chaos is folded up, straightened out, and ruled by no one.
The folds, the order, the rules: the Bible’s business.
A strong passion is useful in that it compels people to outwit it at the same time as they get to know it in its every detail.
He stood before his deadest departed, saying, “God is good.” He repeated it over and over, a thousand, a hundred thousand times, but it did not raise the dead.
He still says God is good, but now the dead don’t even return to him in dreams.
In the mouth of a young Jesuit priest I found God irritating partly because I did not know how how to react. But I found him particularly boring. I like reading about other gods; indeed, stories of gods interest me more than any others, but I avoid our God when I can. Yesterday the young Jesuit suddenly brought him into my room; the place felt strange to me, and I asked myself, “Where am I?”
The same evening the young Jesuit wrote to thank me. His letter was respectful, polite, and cordial. If only I knew whether letters like this are part of his discipline, arising out of missionary zeal, or whether he simply means what he says.
Through a kind of scientific discussion, in which certain names were mentioned and certain books produced, he and I established an immediate rapport. But then, before I could find out what I actually wanted to know (his daily routine), God came between us, and the young Jesuit eagerly, a bit rashly, wrapped himself in him. With this he lost all interest for me; he was transformed before my eyes into a child, a child of God, and of all human phenomena on earth, this is the one thing that bores me to distraction.
I am ashamed for people who fall for God. They are often good people. To be good themselves, these people need to have a power that names and describes goodness. To conquer their innate sinfulness, as we all try to do our own, they require obedience and prescribed exercises. They would be right were it not clear that their obedience has the character of all obedience, and since they do not understand this, they are working in the dark, transforming themselves, with enormous self-discipline, into tools.
But I have observed the tools of obedience and seen how they work. Total devotion has merit, but it must be balanced by an inborn freedom, and it is just this freedom that God cannot allow.
And so I listened to my youthful visitor’s prattle, trying not to let him see that my displeasure was with the very core of his being.
But he was also curious, in his disciplined way. He listened carefully to what I had to say and tried to translate it into categories and patterns familiar to him. I noticed how my statements, which I had already softened and made less pointed, were transformed into something quite different. It was an unpleasant process. I even condescended to speak of the “absolute,” in explaining why I would never give a name to anything that was truly unknown. But since I had said the word “absolute”—which I normally never do—anything else I could add was necessarily worthless.
Read two consecutive sentences of Kafka and you feel smaller than you ever have before. Kafka’s passion for making himself insignificant is transmitted to the reader.
The story of the man who finds women to whom he delegates all the activities that he has taken upon himself to do. I call him the slaveholder. He is a nice, friendly man, but what happens to them is that they become so swollen with all his tasks that they burst.
Asking too many questions is death to a person who feels.
The discoverer, failing now, cursed by his wife, the only one who can still bear him. But even she can no longer bear him—she carries him.
A person who invents orders to give himself so as to avoid any from others. He amasses more and more orders, conducts his affairs, lives his life according to them, until he finally thinks of nothing but them and suffocates.
What can we do with the people from our pasts, with all those we have known? They keep turning up, more and more of them, a kind of transmigration, not of souls but of faces and not in the hereafter but here. Years ago I was so astounded by their turning up in totally new places, with different ages, jobs, languages, that I was determined to write down every occurrence of this phenomenon. But I did so only rarely, and they have gotten more and more numerous. Now they are proliferating so fast that I could never record them all.
What is it about these constantly recurring people? Is there really only a limited number of possible faces? Or can our memories be organized only with the help of such resemblances?
It is of no help at all to know that a solution does not exist for the only problem that does.
The fate of the man who hated the idea of surviving: he made sure that he was survived.
Clarity, but not at the expense of life, whose end is unclear. For it would not be better if we knew that it had a destination?
It goes against my grain to see anything about the “end.” I need infinite openness and a life that doesn’t simply seem like food for worms.
The laughter of asses and that of tigers.
In the strongest passions, those that make life worth living, there is no mercy.
But his love is so great that he includes even the hope of such mercy in it. Though seeing, he is blind.
A man decides to build himself a Pantheon of the Forgotten.
He wishes to change the names that make up our tradition. He believes all revolutions run aground on their sacred names. In his view, we need not the revaluation of all values but the replacing of all names. He thinks humanity must first go through a stage of being orphaned, until those names that he would put in place of the prior ones are strong enough to stand on their own.
He starts by repudiating the great writers, who have been our staple diet for too long, and puts others in their place who are long forgotten.
He hunts for vanished religions and in their founders finds treasure: a new morality.
For him the great monuments of history—the pyramids, temples, and cathedrals—are no more than Augean stables.
The images of gods and idols are likewise hateful to him. He is his own archaeologist doing his own excavations. He finds his flowers in junk rooms and dunghills.
For him, the ancient languages that our modern ones feed on are not the most beautiful. Along the byways of history he finds other, better languages.
He shatters the dominant myths, whose misuse extends even into science, in favor of ones whose power remains unutilized.
He sees in laziness the dominant leitmotiv of history. Progress is made on crutches; we rely on the past rather than push its failed ideas away and proceed at our own pace.
But even the forgotten names, which he has substituted for the overly famous, are of use to him only as long as they are weak. As soon as they have established themselves, they are to be mercilessly removed.
To be sure, he has the young for himself, but he despises them for growing old.
He doesn’t care about other people’s appearance or about his own. He speaks in words, certainly, but doesn’t overvalue them. He is well aware of their unforeseeable, dangerous burden. He lives without caring how he lives, so he lives well.
He has followers, like everyone else with conviction, but these in particular he keeps at arm’s length.
He treats flatterers like lepers, faultfinders like friends, and grumblers like siblings.
He cannot remember even his family. His name is so unimportant to him that he does not change it.
He goes everywhere and talks to everyone. He refuses to meet with people a second time, because they have already spoken with him once.
He succeeds in recognizing no one; thus, he can be just. He doesn’t always understand himself, but he is always understood. “You said…” “I said nothing.” “But is that all you know?” “I know nothing.”
The power of this “nothing” is greater than the “something” of others, only this power is something.
He keeps no appointments and never goes to the same place twice. He regards cities, especially the great, famous ones, as random places. Rome means as little to him as London, Paris as much as New York. On pictures he always gives things the wrong names. He calls Fujiyama Mont Blanc, and Lugano Leicester. The confidence he radiates is that of impartiality. He considers nothing beautiful that once was thought to be so. In the papers the first thing he notices is destruction, but because he doesn’t approve of it, it keeps him free.
As soon as they attain power, how well they all get along. As for the others, it’s as if they did not exist.
“Rather, the wise teacher is one who makes demands of his pupil in such a way that he keeps his character flaws veiled, hidden, and secret.”
Ibn Zafar, 1169
The bungler who always gets what he does not want.
He still takes it seriously, that overused word whose hide was so scalded that it fell off long ago, never to grow back.
In the coarsest words I use to say it, the gentlest words lie hidden, untouchable.
An enemy you have to lend teeth to.
Fame is cursed when it makes a city one man’s.
He sees with painful clarity that what he brought on himself will be his fate. At least he chooses to believe that he wanted what now must come.
It could be that writers who love death can never summon up the combative toughness that the hatred of death provides. Since they have no objection to death, they become spiritually flabby. Death doesn’t trouble them, so nothing compels them to represent death in their work.
Now, there are writers who appear to accept death, so as to trick it, like Schopenhauer. In their inmost selves they remain deeply opposed to it, and this is betrayed in the way they write.
Pause after pause, and in between, quadrangles of words like fortresses.
He is proud that within him there is such a ferment of activity that future generations will never ossify in him.
All the people of the world, all the young people, came to Hampstead to see him.
Only those who can be bothered live. If you can’t be bothered, you have already died.
Someday the prophets will realize that they see only into the past.
Nothing is so antiquated as power. Even faith is more modern.
I have read all the myths and sagas, avoiding those of the Jews. For twelve years the volumes have been standing by the door in my home. I have walked right by them every day, never thinking to open them. Have I had contempt for them? Have I feared them? I don’t think it has been contempt. I am afraid of everything Jewish, afraid of falling under its sway. The well-known names, the age-old destiny, the Jewish way of questioning and answering gets into the very marrow of my being. But how can I be open to everything else if I become too absorbed with that which I already am?
I have been living in these sagas for the past few days and cannot get enough of them. I force myself not to read more than a hundred pages a day. If I had my way, I would do nothing else night and day but read and reread them one by one until I knew the contents of all five volumes by heart. I love the variations on a single story, elaborating what is really always the same. What I have found is the closest thing to Kafka—he has written the sequels to these stories. But they are also my stories; in every exaggeration I recognize my own spirit. I prefer the God of these stories to the one in the Bible—less of a zealot, more human, with a great deal of talk about animals. The animals in the Bible come off badly. But the best thing is the variations on identical themes, as if the tradition contained multiple meanings, with all the interpretations arrayed alongside one another, of equal worth. The moral, pervading everything absolutely, commands our respect. It is never shallow, never sounds preachy. It is both lesson and enlightenment. We feel ourselves in the company of a few sage men, thinking men who wish to be just, and I have been looking for such men my whole life. I have found just one, Sonne, and so everything I read here sounds as if it came from him.
As Adam still lay on the ground, a lump of clay, God pondered: “Shall I leave him thus?” He was pleased with the well-formed shape. If it breathed would it do evil? “Perhaps he does not deserve my giving breath to him?” For God was not omniscient; all that he created was independent of him. Nothing was predetermined, and all things came the way they wished. There was not even a louse that didn’t crawl as it liked. And even the gazelle outran the lion when it cared enough to do so. For God had never imagined ruling over Creation. He would work his will and make things with it, and when they came to life and ran off, that was fine with him. Nor did he much want to remember all that he made. He wanted innovation: this and only this excited and amused him. God was alone, he was always alone, and all the stories about his companion are invention. One need only imagine what it was like to be alone. Would, say, a human have found it any easier? One comes upon all kinds of thoughts when alone, and these thoughts of God became Creation.
The excess fat in my works will turn rancid. Only a few sentences will remain. But which will they be?
The prophets deplore most deeply that which they themselves have brought to pass. How could they admit to themselves and grasp that their fears were justified?
The first truly human being would be one who never killed and never wished death for himself.
That the hubris of passion leads to madness: how can you revere the Greeks so if you did not learn that from them?