Status Updates From Diários: 1909-1923

We … are held in our past and future. … Whatever advantage the future has in size, the past compensates for in weight, and at their end the two are indeed no longer distinguishable, earliest youth later becomes distinct, as the future is, and the end of the future is really already experienced in all our sighs, and thus becomes the past. So this circle along whose rim we move almost closes.

[…]

Externally I am a man like others, … But if I lacked an upper lip here, there an ear, here a rib, there a finger, … this would still be no adequate counterpart to my inner imperfection. This imperfection is not congenital and therefore so much the more painful to bear. For like everyone, I too have my centre of gravity inside me from birth, and this not even the most foolish education could displace.

[…]

I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body.

When despair shows itself so definitely, is so tied to its object, so pent up, as in a soldier who covers a retreat and thus lets himself be torn to pieces, then it is not true despair. True despair overreaches its goal immediately and always, (at this comma it became clear that only the first sentence was correct).

[…]

On diary 10

lachen oder weinen

hahaha ja ich liebe ihn

"Una de las ventajas de llevar un diario consiste en que uno se vuelve, con una claridad tranquilizadora, consciente de las transformaciones a las que está sometido incesantemente, unas transformaciones que uno crea, presiente y admite generalmente de un modo natural, pero que siempre niega inconscientemente cuando se trata de obtener esperanza y paz con semejante reconocimiento."