Noel’s Reviews > Diaries, 1910-1923 > Status Update

so despairing from the very start that in my excitement I asked the lawyer the only question I had left after the long reading, which at once revealed my complete misunderstanding of a rather long section of the agreement that had just been read.

(Not that I identify with this passage, but I think it’s an important one for understanding Kafka. In his letter to his father, he writes: “Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.”)

(A passage from earlier I didn’t post, p. 71:

“If I reach my fortieth year, then I’ll probably marry an old maid with protruding upper teeth left a little exposed by the upper lip. The upper front teeth of Miss K., who was in Paris and London, slant towards each other a little like legs which are quickly crossed at the knees. I’ll hardly reach my fortieth birthday, however; the frequent tension over the left half of my skull, for example, speaks against it – it feels like an inner leprosy which, when I only observe it and disregard its unpleasantness, makes the same impression on me as the skull cross-section in textbooks, or as an almost painless dissection of the living body where the knife – a little coolingly, carefully, often stopping and going back, sometimes lying still – splits still thinner the paper-thin integument close to the functioning parts of the brain.”)

(Kafka’s diaries are full of really tedious descriptions of the many plays he went to see that are slowing me down.)