FROM KAFKA'S DIARIES
361
Although I have given my name distinctly in writing to the hotel,
although they have twice written to me correctly, down on the board
it says Josef K. Should I set them right, or should I ask them to en–
lighten me?
January 30.
When someone says: "What do I care about life?
It is only because of my family that I do not want to die." But the
family is precisely the representative of life, therefore he wants to remain
alive for the sake of life. Now so far as my mother is concerned this
holds for me too, but only of late. But it is perhaps gratitude and emo–
tion that bring me to this? Gratitude and emotion, because I see how
she tries, with inexhaustible energy considering her age, to make up
for my lack of relation to life. But gratitude is life too.
February 1.
Nothing, only fatigue. The happiness of the wagoner,
who experiences every evening as I experienced mine of this day, and
even much more pleasantly. An evening on the stove, for instance. Man
purer than in the morning, the time before the weary falling asleep is the
actual time of freedom from specters, all are driven away, only as night
advances, do they return, they are back even though unrecognizable, and
then the healthy man daily begins to drive them off anew.
Seen primitively, it is solely physical pain which is the actual, in–
controvertible truth, unaffected by anything external (martyrdom, sacri–
fice for a human being). Strange, that it was not the god of pain who
was the principal god of the earliest religions (but perhaps only of the
later ones). To each patient his household god, to the consumptive the
god of suffocation. How can one bear his approach if one does not par–
take of him even before the terrible union?
February 2.
Happiness, to be together with people.
February 3.
Sleepless, almost entirely; plagued by dreams, as
though etched into me, a resistant material.
One weakness, one defect is clear, though difficult to describe; it
is a mixture of apprehensiveness, withholding, loquacity, lukewarmness;
I want to describe something definite, a group of weaknesses that repre–
sent in a particular aspect one single, precisely characterized weakness
(distinct from the great vices such as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This weak–
ness keeps me both from insanity and from every ascent. Because it
keeps me from insanity, I cultivate it; from fear of insanity, I sacrifice
the ascent, and shall certainly lose the bargain on this level, which knows
no bargain; unless sleepiness intervenes and by its daily-nightly work
