Noel > Recent Status Updates

Since starting this book I have moved countries, I’ve gone through university, I’ve been heartbroken, I’ve broken hearts…

I lied… I’m actually just starting this afternoon. Anyway, this is very well written and engaging, and hopefully I’ll be able to finish it the next few days when I don’t have work.

Watched Rome, Open city for a class and am now really interested in reading about Italy’s fascist period. (I’ve now marked a ton of books as “currently reading,” but I’ll actually read this one. I think.)

The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my

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My parents were playing cards; I sat apart, a perfect stranger; my father asked me to take a hand, or at least to look on; I made some sort of excuse. What is the meaning of these refusals, oft repeated since my childhood? I could have availed myself of invitations to take part in social, even, to an extent, public life; everything required of me I should have done, if not well, at least in middling fashion;

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It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons.

It is astounding how I have systematically destroyed myself in the course of the years, it was like a slowly widening breach in a dam, a purposeful action. The spirit that brought it about must now be celebrating triumphs; why doesn’t it let me take part in them? But perhaps it hasn’t yet achieved its purpose and can therefore think of nothing else.

Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.

Completely indifferent and apathetic. A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there. Nothing, nothing. … What is there to tie me to a past or a future? The present is a phantom state for me; I don’t sit at the table but hover round it. Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom, merely emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.

Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone – never.

Kafka’s diaries might honestly be my favorite thing I’ve ever read. In fact, “favorite” is understating it. This is a guidebook for life. It’s impact on me so far is comparable only to the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, the sum total of David Wojnarowicz’s writings, and Kafka’s own letters to Milena. Those three authors basically write the way I think, but especially Kafka.

I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth.

(A lovely short sketch.)

I paced up and down my room from early morning unto twilight. The window was open, it was a warm day. The noise of the narrow street beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from having looked at in the course of my pacing up and down. My eyes had travelled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its last convolution, noted every mark of age it

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(Yet more quotes I have to save for my sanity:)

Only this everlasting waiting, eternal helplessness.

There will certainly be no one to blame if I should kill myself, even if the immediate cause should for instance appear to be F.’s [Felice’s] behaviour. Once, half asleep, I pictured the scene that would ensue if, in anticipation of the end, the letter of farewell in my pocket, I should come to her house, should be rejected as a suitor, lay the letter on the table, go to the balcony, break away from all

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What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Weakness, self-destruction, tip of a flame of hell piercing the floor.

To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around one’s neck and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last fragments of me when it breaks through the roof tiles, is seen on the roof.

It has become very necessary to keep a diary again. The uncertainty of my thoughts, F., the ruin in the office, the physical impossibility of writing and the inner need for it.

This story, ‘The Judgement’, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd–23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I heaved my own weight on my back.

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The hollow which the work of genius has burned into our surroundings is a good place into which to put one’s little light. Therefore the inspiration that emanates from genius, the universal inspiration that doesn’t only drive one to imitation.

The invention of the devil. If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us. His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his

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Yesterday, behind us, out of boredom, a man fell from his chair – Comparison by Rachilde: Those who rejoice in the sun and demand that others rejoice are like drunkards coming from a wedding at night who force those they meet to drink the health of the unknown bride.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

…the future … which is never out of my sight. What evenings, walks, despair in bed and on the sofa are still before me, worse than those I have already endured!

My receptivity to the Jewishness in these plays deserts me because they are too monotonous and degenerate into a wailing that prides itself on isolated, violent outbreaks. When I saw the first plays it was possible for me to think that I had come upon a Judaism on which the beginnings of my own rested, a Judaism that was developing in my direction and so would enlighten and carry me farther along in my own

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“Je vais te me les disperser, moi !” —I was curious about this construction and found that there was already a question about it on the French Language Stack Exchange. Apparently, it’s the ethical dative, which Wiktionary says was used in Latin but is rare in English, and gives these examples:

I'm gonna smoke me a cigarette!

I'll rhyme you so eight years together, —Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.2

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One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived,

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