MODERN EVIDENCE
From Franz Kafka's Diary*
1917
September 15.
In so far as you have a chance at all, you have the
chance of making a beginning. Do not waste it. You will be unable to
draw back from the filth that will well up from your depths when you
try to force an entrance. But do not wallow in it.
If
the wound in your
lung is only a symbol, as you maintain, a symbol of a wound inflamed
by F.** and measured in depth by your expiation-if this is so, then the
medical advice (light, air, mn, rest) is a symbol too. Hold on to this
symbol.
Oh, beautiful hour, masterful equipoise, garden grown wild. You
turn out of your house, and on the garden-path the goddess of joy
rushes toward you.
Majestic apparition, Prince of the Realm.
And
w
I would entrust myself to death. Remnants of a faith.
Return to father. Great day of reconciliation.
Forever incomprehensible to me, that for almost anyone who can
write it is possible in pain to objectivize pain, so that I, for example,
in my misfortune, perhaps even with misfortune's head still aflame, can
sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Indeed, I can even go
beyond that, and in various embellishments that talent permits-em–
bellishments that seem to have nothing to do with misfortune-! can
engage in fantasies about it simply or antithetically or with whole
orchestras of associations. And this is not at all untruthful, it does not
quiet the pain, it is merely, by a gift of grace, an excess of energies
let loose in a moment in which pain has nonetheless visibly consumed
all my energies to the very depths of my being, thus churned up. What
sort of excess is it, then?
*
Translated and printed by arrangement with Schocken Books Inc., New
York.
**
F.B., the young woman from Berlin to whom Kafka was twice engaged.
fhe second engagement was broken off in 1917.-Ed.
